LAX, Paris, Casablanca, & Tangier
“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun.”
-Marcus Aurelius
January 10–12, 2024
Travel is a gift. Saying goodbye to loved ones, long-haul flights, navigating new places, and language barriers can be daunting—but the ability to make your way easily to the remotest places on earth is a modern phenomenon easily taken for granted.
New Year’s Eve brought with it the startling reality that a year had passed since listening to the Pet Shop Boys and singing Auld Lang Syne in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle at Hogmanay. And now here I was, headed toward LAX to board a plane for Morocco, the gift of my first chance to set foot on the African continent. It’s Monday, January 10, 2024, and Amanda and I said our goodbyes at the Amtrak station in San Luis Obispo.
Even the more mundane aspects of travel have their rewards. Take for example the decision to take Amtrak from SLO to LA. True, I had to wake early for the 6:11 departure, but the coastal views through Vandenberg Air Force Base are the exclusive privilege of train passengers, and the hillsides and ocean bathed in the glow of morning light was a wonderful start of the day.
I was just past Camarillo when Dave texted me that he had received an email from Air France unceremoniously informing him our flight was cancelled. No explanation. Just the harsh reality. Deal with it. We were rescheduled for a flight the following afternoon. Instead of departing at 9:50 pm on Wednesday, we made peace with a 3:25 pm departure on Thursday.
Thursday morning we enjoyed some great coffee at Copa (apparently short for coffee parlor) in Long Beach and then took a long stroll through the El Dorado Nature Center. Dave’s friend Paul met us at Dave’s house around noon and dropped us off at LAX where we boarded Air France Flight 65 (Boeing 777-300ER) for the nearly 11-hour journey to Paris.
We arrived at Charles De Gaulle Airport a bit past our scheduled 11:15 am arrival, already Friday, January 12. We raced to airport security (not sure why there was another security check since we were already inside the secured airport), to see if we could get on the 12:30 flight to Morocco. The flight was full. No joy.
We walked to the Air France customer service desk in the terminal and were able to get onto the 3:10 pm flight, turning our 7+ hour layover nightmare, into a more manageable 3½ hours. Air France Flight 1196 (Airbus A320) departed only slightly behind schedule, arriving in Casablanca around 6:30 pm.
Passport control was maddeningly slow. Dave made it out ahead of me, so he immediately made his way outside to meet our driver, who had been waiting for nearly an hour for our arrival. To delay us even further, I took the wrong exit which put me at the train platform rather than the automobile exit. I had to go through security again, to get back into the airport so I could make it to Dave and our driver. (It turns out, we may have been able to take a high-speed train from the airport to our hotel in Tangier, but we didn’t know this was an option.)
Between the delayed flight, slow passport control, and me exiting the wrong door—we didn’t get into the car until about 8 pm. The drive from Casablanca Airport (which is well south of the city center) was nearly four hours, which placed us at Fredj Hotel around midnight. I waited with our bags while Dave walked across the street with our driver to an ATM so we could withdrawal dirham, the legal tender in Morocco. We tipped the driver $25 each (500 dh) before he made his four-hour drive back to Casablanca (Yikes!). It could have been worse: had we not gotten on the earlier flight, we wouldn’t have made it to our driver until 10 pm, which would have put us at our hotel around 2 am. Small mercies.
It was a tremendously long day of travel but, little did we know, we would wake up in the morning and be so grateful we had made the effort.
Dave and I at LAX just before boarding our flight to Paris.
