France 🇫🇷

We got up early and walked to the airport from our hotel, ibis budget Nice Aéroport. It took a while to find the check-in counters for TAP Air Portugal. We’re not used to seeing no lines. The check-in agent issued each of us a consolidated boarding pass for both our flights: to Lisbon and then to Terceira. I asked about our bags, and they said that the system showed them the bags from Lufthansa and then made a call to someone about something. It was all in French, so I didn’t understand a thing. But I was hoping that things behind the scenes would have been sorted out and our bags would make it to Terceira. I asked if there was a Star Alliance Gold lounge we could access and was told to go to the Library Lounge after the security check. There was no crowd, and after clearing security, we headed to the Library Lounge for breakfast. ...

After just making the connection from Pune, we boarded LH763 from Delhi to Munich. We had bulkhead seats on this flight. 31D and 31G, both aisle seats in the middle 3 seats in a typical 3-3-3 widebody configuration. The seats had the tray tables in the armresrts and the armrest for 31D was fixed on both sides and the armrest between 31F and 31G was movable. The flight attendant in the galley in front of our seats suggested that since we were traveling together we should take seats 31F and 31G and offer 31D to anyone who shows up for the middle seat, but from his records that seat was still empty. We thanked him for the tip and sat in our originally assigned seats hoping that no one would turn up on the middle seat. Soon the cabin crew announced that boarding was completed and we had 3 seats for the 2 of us to stretch out a little more. ...

After more than 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown, we were looking forward to some travel. I have been collecting miles on United MileagePlus for quite some time and I was scouting for destinations which we wanted to visit and where we could maximize our miles. Europe was on top of our list and I was trying to figure out how we could do the most with that. My wife has always wanted to visit Iceland and I wanted to go to the Azores. ...

I had stayed over with a friend (from the USA) who was now based in Basel, and had enjoyed the previous day with him and his family. Today I was to meet up with another friend from work; the plan was to drive to Strasbourg and spend the day there. He picked me up around 7:00 AM, and soon we were on our way. After leaving Switzerland, we drove on the German side of the border until Kehl. We had not met in a long time and it was nice to catch up with each other during the drive. We crossed the Pont de l’Europe over the Rhine into France and parked the car close to Tour du Bourreau. ...