Back on the Ground

What a trip that was. I'm glad to be in one place and not in some airport. We've had some bad luck on this ill-fated trip. We skirted disaster from the beginning, where it all started with a power black out in downtown Toronto, resulting in our near miss of the flight to Paris. Once in Paris, the hotel we reserved was overbooked, so they sent us to another down the street. Jetlagged and barely conscious, we hauled our own bags (India has spoiled us). The hotel seemed nice enough, and was in a better location than the one we'd booked and although we were inconvenienced, we were just happy to be in Paris. But at 9:00 am the next morning, we awoke to the high-pitched sounds of drilling into the floor of our broom-closet-sized room. The hotel they put us up in was under renovation.

Perhaps it was the fact that we sought out the graves of Samuel Beckett and Baudelaire in the Montparnasse cemetery that we lost our expensive smartphone that evening. It feels like we've been running for days, looking for the mobile in the streets of Paris, and then rushing to the airport to catch our flight to Bombay. But Bombay was under water, and so we were delayed for three days, and because no information was provided by Air France, we returned to the airport over those three days at 6:00 am to check on its status. We finally rescheduled a flight to Delhi, and after two more days in Delhi, and another five-hour delay at the Delhi airport, we've finally made it back to Bangalore. It’s not home, but it’s where our stuff is for now.

I’ve just found out that disaster has gone full circle. The flight we were meant to arrive on, Paris to Toronto, crashed and burst into flames last night; we would have been on that flight had we not changed our plans at the last minute.

On the writing front, as you can imagine, I've gotten nothing done. If any of my critique partners has some time to look at my flawed story, I'd really appreciate it.