Day: May 26, 2024

I woke up this morning around 3 am…naturally, having operated by a European clock for the last two weeks. Come daybreak I couldn’t do much except sit around and chat with Jett, Cait and Sutton and, you know, do grandfather stuff. And then I crashed for a couple of hours. All to say this is more of a recovery than a filing day.

But I’ll have at least three topics to wade into when I return to Connecticut — watching the original King Kong with 2 and 1/2 year-old Sutton, re-watching the original Ant Man and a rehash of the whole Bernardo Bertolucci-Maria Schneider Last Tango in Paris thing, thanks to Jessica Palud‘s Being Maria, an out-of-competition Cannes film that I didn’t get to but have read about. From what I’ve gathered and have personally been told, it distorts big-time.

NYC transit system to weary traveller upon his return from France:

Welcome back, Chuck, and now the ordeal begins.

Nine and a half hours from Nice Airport take-off at 2 pm (or 8 am by a Manhattan clock) to your JFK 5:30 pm touchdown, you say?

Followed by 170 drag-ass minutes (customs, luggage retrieval, endless walking, Air Train, missing the Howard Beach A train by seconds), topped off by your A train’s sluggish arrival at Penn Station at 8:20 pm, thereby causing you to miss your 8:11 pm Jersey Transit train to West Orange.

I had awoken on Saturday morning at the NYC equivalent of 12:30 am.

London and Nice-area mass transit systems are faster, smoother, more comfortable and less arduous, you say? They actually have escalators everywhere, unlike NYC?

I began my Cannes-to-Nice bus voyage (free voucher supplied by Cannes Film Festival staff) at the NYC time zone equivalent of 4:30 am and finally walked through Jett’s door in West Orange last night at roughly 9:15 pm or 3:15 am Cannes time, or nearly 23 hours later.

What do you do, whine for a living? Are you a baby, some kind of chronic complainer? Are you a man or a mouse? Nine and a half hours of flying plus 14 hours of ground transport and waiting on both ends…par for the course.