Bienvenue a France - before I even get there

Lots of empty seats and
the croissants are great!

LONDON (LHR) -- The first leg of the reccy began today (actually yesterday if you count my departure from the island) and landed me in Heathrow via an overnight flight from JFK. Sufficiently nackered (or is it knackered?), as they say here, I set out to make my connection to Paris. {By the way, why is that when you arrive in Heathrow and have a connecting flight
to somewhere else, you don't have to pass through customs and immigration? The Americans have done away with the 'in transit' convenience years ago, so it seems like a gaping security hole. Or maybe I'm just bummed that I didn't get to use my brand spankin' new UK/TCI passport...}

Anyway, I stumble my way to Terminal 4 where Air France flights depart, and quickly notice on the big board that there are flights to Charles de Gaulle just about every hour. As I had managed to jump on an earlier flight from JFK to Heathrow last night, I arrived earlier than planned in London so figured I could grab an earlier flight to Paris, too. Cool - jump an earlier flight, get an earlier TGV train to Aix and I get some extra time to explore. There were in fact two flights available before my scheduled 10:30AM flight so surely it wouldn't be a problem, especially early on a Saturday morning.

Not so fast, mon ami!

I was treated to my first doses of French attitude...I mean service, when I attempted to re-book on an earlier flight. "This is not possible...you are on the flight that departs at 10:30. Your ticket is not changeable," I am told twice, the second time at the gate where the 7:00am flight was to depart - with a solid dozen or so weary looking French people sat around to fill the 100+ seat plane (French government subsidized Airbus plane, no doubt). Now, I'm thinking this should be as easy as changing a Boston-to-New York shuttle flight, right? No checked bags, no overbooked planes - c'mon aboard (it was that easy in JFK last night getting on the earlier AA flight to London).

Mais non, ce n'est pas possible avec Air France.

Nothing, as we have been told, is easy in France, apparently not even getting there from London. Ah well, might as well get used to it. Besides, after living in the Caribbean for 13 years, one tends to have lower levels of expectation when it comes to service.

So I sit in Heathrow - which is actually quite a busy place at 7AM on a Saturday - and watch two Air France flights, full of empty seats (is that grammatically correct?) leave for CDG. Meanwhile I'm out 10 bucks for the UK power converter I had to buy for my laptop so I could sit here and complain about lousy French airline service. Go figure. At least I have a French power converter already in hand...which brings up a whole other question...