Ash cloud

I drove to Nice last Thursday, to pick up our friends Erica and Bob (and their baby) at the airport. I figured they'd be tired after their long flight from Vancouver, via Frankfurt; and, as I know from sad experience, traveling with an infant is rarely conducive to fine dining in transit; so when they emerged from customs, I planned to welcome them to the south of France with some of my favorite fresh olive bread and an assortment of cheeses – including an amazing Comté that I'd discovered the week before. But – spoiler alert! – they didn't arrive on schedule. They were late!

You maybe haven't heard because it's probably been buried in the back pages of your local paper that you don't even read anymore and is going out of business anyway, but apparently there was some volcano in Iceland that erupted last week, spilling ash into the sky, and causing problems for flights in and out of European airports. Yeah, it was news to me too. So, anyway, they missed their connection in Frankfurt. What a pain. Sure, Luftansa found room for them on the very next flight to Nice that afternoon, but that was, like, three hours later. Three hours! That's three hours I was forced to spend hanging out on the Côte d'Azur, munching on olive bread and aged cheeses under the palm trees and Mediterranean sunshine. That's three hours of my life I'm never gonna get back. Freakin' volcano. Talk about inconvenience!

Wait. What? You'd already heard about the volcano? And what's that? You don't think that my faux-outraged tale of minor delays and fine cheeses registers – not even a tiny bit – on the ash-related tale-o'-woe-o-meter? Oh. Okay, fine. I'll stop fishing fruitlessly for sympathy. I'll go back to tolerating your envy instead.

Given that almost all European airspace has been off-limits to airplanes for the past week, and that a hundred thousand people have been spending days and days becoming all the more depressing familiar with the bright un-cozy corridors of FRA or LHR or CDG, with no exit in sight, it's really quite amazing that Erica and Bob and their baby made it here at all. When you're traveling overseas with a squalling infant, it's hard to remain chipper in the face of airline inconvenience; but it maybe helps just a bit when, for days on end, the news stories remind you that, in fact, you are about the least inconvenienced air travelers in all of Europe.

So, anyway, instead of spending their week surreally trapped in transit, Erica and Bob have been doing exactly the kinds of things that you'd envision our visitors doing – and which you'd be doing yourselves if you were hanging out with us: Drinking rosé and eating leisurely lunches on our terrace, going for sunny walks where the rosemary grows wild and abundant on the hillsides, spending ever more money on ever more vast quantities of olives and cheeses at the Tuesday morning market. Playing a lot of ping-pong. Oh, also, Erica and Bob have been wiping copious amounts of baby slobber off of their baby's chin, their own clothes, and pretty much every surface of our house. You know, it's not been so very long since Jasper and Maddox were that age, but I'd totally forgotten how much drool an infant can produce. Like a spaniel or something. Anyway, wine and cheese and drool. That's life here in France these days. That and an eager interest in the volcano and its consequences.

Speaking of which: Quincy's brother Galen has been staying here with us as well. He arrived way back when the airplanes were still flying regular schedules, but his stay here has gone on longer than originally planned. He was ticketed to leave last Sunday, from Marseilles to Frankfurt and then onward. So, obviously, that didn't happen. He's been on his laptop a lot, monitoring the ash cloud chaos with some amusement, and working out a plausible exit strategy. His latest plan involves taking advantage of our relative proximity to the open-airspace promised-land that is Spain: A series of trains from Aix to Marseilles to Montpelier to Barcelona, and then to Madrid, and then an alleged flight out of Madrid. We'll see.