I was barely in Paris at the citizenM Hotel by the airport, where I killed two nights. I’ve not much to say about the experience¹ but I still think it’s worth talking about how I ended up here. My original plans, made months ago, were to fly to fly to Paphos on Cyprus last Monday, spend some time there, then travel by bus to Larnica and spend another 4-5 days before flying back to Berlin in preparation for playing two larps back-to-back.

But just a little over a week ago an emergency cropped up and I suddenly needed to be in Newfoundland for a week.² This was really the only time which worked — I’ve a month scheduled in South Africa which would have been a nightmare to reschedule — so something had to give.

The first thing to go was Larnica. I booked a trip with an extremely tight turnaround, that had me leave halfway through my trip to Cyprus and get back the day before I needed to be on the bus for the larp. That meant Larnica was out. The next thing to go, tragically, was the larp. My original schedule had me arriving in Berlin with a few days to prepare for the game; my new schedule had me arriving the day before, jetlagged, after a 10 hour flight. I was going to be a mess, and the thought of rushing through the larp prep and then dropping myself into an emotional meatgrinder seemed like the height of stupidity.

That let me rebook my flights to something approaching sanity, leaving well before I needed to arrive so I had a little time to adjust to the time change, and returning on a direct flight.³ But this just lead to another problem. Cyprus, being mainly a holiday destination, simply doesn’t have cheap, direct flights on short notice. My original tickets were bought early enough that it wasn’t a problem, but trying to find a return flight on short notice proved there wasn’t anything for less than 800€, and even those weren’t great.⁴ I’d have to leave at least the day before to land in time, and that’d mean I’d have at most a couple days in Cyprus and wouldn’t really be able to see the place.

So I cancelled my trip to Cyprus entirely. I thought I’d just crash in Paris for the week before my flight, but I only had two days left on my Schengen visa⁵ so had to spend three nights in Dublin before I flew to Paris. So I’m back on some semblance of a plan.

This is really the worst side of travel, where everything’s being planned on short notice and you don’t have much control over where you’re going or how much you’re going to spend to get there. The hotels on Cyprus weren’t refundable. Neither were my original flights. But here I am, about to board an eight hour flight to go someplace I don’t particularly want to be. Here’s hoping the trip is painless.

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Footnotes

¹ The rise of these cheap, global hotel brands is fine, good even. They’re usually cheaper, the WiFi is strong and fast, the beds are comfortable, and the showers are great. But they’re also all the same, with no quirks or sense of place. They’re a great place to spent 2-3 nights — this one is effectively just an extension of the Charles de Gaulle Airport, so fine for what is essentially extended transit — but dreadful for spending much more than that.

² I’m not going to go into the specifics so just trust me when I say no one’s sick, no one’s dead, and “emergency” is a very loosely defined term. The whole trip is very aggressively neutral, all around.

³ Semi-direct; I still have to hop a flight to Montreal, but it’s direct from there rather than bouncing through Newark and then Toronto like the first flight did.

⁴ One of the better ones left at 6am and flew to Tel Aviv before getting me on a flight to Paris.

⁵ I technically had a week, but much of that time was in the Faroe Islands and I can’t easily prove I was there. I was sweating bullets in the immigration line for Paris expecting to have to defend my status but the officer just stamped my passport and waved me through.