130808 CDG -> MUC AF1022

After landing I felt quite weird. My body saying it was morning, my watch saying late afternoon. I felt like somebody playing a joke on me.
As if it was not enough, the shiny sun seemed to confirm the joke on me from high above, bright in the sky. I feel like a zombie. But in a few more hours I would be seeing my beloved wife and my little daughter. Proud daddy of his little baby.
Activated the WiFi and was planning on skyping Vicky. She hasn't wanted to Skype with for the last 5 days. I think she is angry for me being away for so long. It has been 10 days since I left on the trip.
And today Skype is not helping, decided to validate if it's really me. So besides username and password, today Skype wants to send a token to my phone to validate it. It's good to have such mechanisms, it does provide extra safety, but today is just a hassle. The phone I registered with Skype is having difficulty on registering to a network while roaming. So can't receive the damn token. Looks like there is a second mechanism for validating, via email. Let's try that. I must be in a bad luck strike, the email service is also not working. Loose 45 minutes on this, did not relax or enjoy the smile of my little daughter.
Flight is late, like the cherry on top of the cake. Seams to bring some weight in the apparently unlucky day. Let's not blame it on the day, we still have a few hours and the early day went quite well. I'm blaming on airport Charles de Gaulle. Never liked this airport, especially terminal 1, I believe it's the most horrible airport in the world. Built in an era of architecture experimentation, the building has a lot of corridors and escalators organised with apparent randomness around a hollow centre. Terminal 2 is slightly better, but nevertheless does not transmit any special comfort.
Once at the gate, the chaos seems to be happily installed there. Many queues for different gates in an extremely small area that serves 5 gates. We are immersed in a sea of people.
The flight is delayed by 40 minutes. This is not good, I am keen on swing Vicky before she goes to bed. Let's hope that having Mommy tell her I arrive today will keep her awake until I reach home.
After seated on the plane, my travel companion makes a funny comment on the people asking if this was the flight to Munich. Seamed quite absurd that once already on the plane such a mistake would occur. Not a moment too soon when some person complains about somebody else being on his seat. Well, the seat was correct, just not the flight. Somebody planning to travel to Bordeaux managed to get on the same plane. Poor guy left the plane always looking back to get validation for the mistake, only to see the flight attendants close the door immediately after he exited the plane.
The plane seems to take forever to reach the runway. I am getting nervous, looks like CDG does not want today to be a good day for me. It seamed like a full 20 minutes passed before we could feel the thrust of the engines of this Airbus A321.
Munich, Vicky, here I come.

130807 SFO -> CDG AF085

Got on the plane, seats much better then expected, but then, last time I travels Air France in an intercontinental flight was in 2009 on the trip to Houston.
Real glad with the comfort of the seats. Listening to lots of French conversations, I wonder why I am surprised, after all it's a flight to France, I am the complete foreigner onboard. Not only the fact that I am Portuguese, but also since living in Munich makes me feel comfortable while hearing German language even though I don't speak it any good. It does feel refreshing.
The middle seat in the row takes a bit out of the comfort. Will try to not give them a hard time moving in and out of the seat. Take the moment before takeoff to get to the toilet and change. Since the first time I got comfy clothes for the trip, it seams much more enjoyable. Although coming onboard with comfortable clothes, it is never good to sleep in polos. The fabric makes me feel like sleeping on a sofa, we can do it, but it's far from sleeping on the bed. So decided to pack into the backpack some comfy training clothes.
Managed to get to the toilet and changed. Get all that will need for the trip onto the seat area, and am ready to depart.
Let's enjoy the flight, and try somehow to sleep. Will need to be fresh on Friday, for the last day on the job.
The airplane is a Boeing 777-200, the plane quite is quite big, sits a lot of people. Business class cabin is quite wide and sits 7 people within 2 aisles, a combination 2x3x2.
Going to try again the winning procedure from last time. Take a sleeping aid pill to get to sleep, and repeats again the process tonight when I get home. Seams that using the sleeping aid pill to force your body into adaptation of the different timezones much better than just trying to adapt at the regular pace. I have always suffered a lot to recover from jet lag, especially when returning from the states back to Europe. Will see how it goes along gthe week.
The dinner served was quite good actually. Air France does take care of business class food..
As soon as I got onto the plane, I setup the Withings to track sleep. Will be nice to get an image of how the sleep went. Nice gadget this one. Bought it at Best Buy and have been tracking sleep and daily activity so far. It might be a nice tool to get an extra caution on health.
Falling asleep was quite good and fast. Somehow still managed to see the last Tom Cruise movie "Oblivion". Had the feeling that would fall asleep in the middle of the movie, but didn't happen. So must confess the movie kept me awake and interested all the time. Not quite like "Wolverine" where I managed to fall asleep twice during some very boring parts of the movie. When I woke up had the temptation to see "Iron Man 3", but the small screen aboard the aircraft takes out the grandiosity of seeing the movie in a proper movie the at her with a huge screen, surround sound, and all the works. Definitively I feel would be a loss to all the experience of watching the movie.
After landing the connecting flight will be within the next 50 minutes. The terminal seems to be just adjacent, but we still have to go over passport control. So seems to have to be quite a bit of rush to get onto the next flight. No time to have a look at the airport. Knowing and having experienced a bit about flying, I will definitively will have to wait some hours for some flight in the future, just like I have already experienced in the past, in this same airport. Actually this year back in March.