Goodbye parents, hello volcano!

Unfortunately, or fortunately, mother earth decided to grace us with yet another natural disaster, a volcano in Iceland. What a fluke that the ash cloud from the northern volcano would prevent all flights out of Northern Europe for a whole week! Quite bizarre, indeed. I had to return to Clermont-Ferrand for classes, and my parents were stuck in Paris for an indeterminable amount of time. With the ash cloud not seeming to ease up in the next couple of days, they decided to make the best of their French entrapment and rent a car to visit Normandy. It would have been nice to show them C-F, however, there is really nothing to do here, plus it is 3.5 hours south of Paris by train. I am glad they were able to see Normandy, including the WWII beaches and museum, however, when they finally returned to the U.S. on Friday (4/23), I think they were definitely happy to be home and out of France!

The volcano affected a lot of people, conveniently occurring at the same time as the French train-union’s strike. My roommate, Kate was in Ireland, and could not get back by train or plane (due to water and ash cloud), so she ended up taking a 19-hour ferry from Ireland to France. Yikes! I had other friends stuck in Greece, the Netherlands, and Spain. One friend was stuck in Barcelona, among many others frantically trying to get back to Paris. He ended up finding a bus that could take him back to Paris, however, he needed to find 60 other people to ride with him to pay the full fare. This resulted in him walking around with a sign claiming “Bus to Paris,” with people actually begging to get on. The bus that came to pick them up apparently had a breathalyzer test on it before it could be driven, and it took the bus driver 2 hours to pass it before they could get on the road! I could not stop laughing when he was telling me of his misfortunes traveling back to France.