The Spirit of Adventure - Michael McCafferty

Day 2: A Day of Challenges
Paris, France
The fully loaded Boeing 747 made the smoothest landing I have ever experienced
in a commercial airliner. I was hoping it was a good omen for my adventure. It wasn’t.
Upon arrival at Orly, a major airport in the south of Paris, the first challenge was to
purchase a ticket to Bordeaux. Apparently, my travel agent back home had forgotten to
include that ticket with my travel packet, so I was now on my own for this leg of the
journey. I had no idea where to find Air Liberte', and simply kept walking straight until it
magically appeared before me. Thankfully the clerk spoke English and the transaction
was easy. As she was helping me, this same clerk was also speaking French to her coworker.
I told her that I couldn't understand a word she was saying, but that her
language was quite beautiful. She smiled and blushed very nicely!
The next challenge was to make a phone call to my contact in Bordeaux to make
sure everything was okay with the plane. To make a phone call, I needed some French
money and handled that easily enough via a cashier at the airport. The clerk gave me all
bank notes, and when I asked for some change for the phone, she informed me that French
payphones do not take coins! They require credit cards or prepaid phonecards. How very
enlightened of the French! But then, they were always far ahead of the USA in the area of
telephones, especially with their Minitel system. So all I had to do was figure out how to
use the machine that dispensed the prepaid phonecards, using my credit card as payment.
After several attempts at decoding the international symbols on the dispenser, and
feeling quite stupid for doing all the wrong things, I finally succeeded at purchasing my
prepaid phonecard and proceeded to attack the payphone itself. This again proved to be a
humbling experience, and I could feel the eyes of every Frenchman in the airport laughing
at my stupid attempts to master this basic machine. (Hey, I'm a software guy, not a
hardware guy!) Of course, eventually, I got it all sorted out and made my first French
payphone call. I felt suddenly very much the world traveler.
The call itself wasn't a very pleasant experience, actually. I got some very bad
news that my biplane, shipped overseas and delivered on time to the seaport of Le Havre,
had progressed no further. It had not been forwarded to Bordeaux as required, and was
in fact not going to be sent anywhere without the payment of a deposit of 15 percent of the
value of the airplane (15% of 250k = $37,500). Ouch! My contact Bernard Chabbert was
continuing to haggle with the Customs people, and brilliantly convinced them to truck the
plane to Le Bourget airport, the site of the Paris Air Show where the plane was to be
displayed by the Waco factory, without paying the deposit. So now all of our plans for reassembly
had to be shifted 400 miles north to Le Bourget, from Bordeaux. Bernard
handled it all superbly.
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