This story starts in Bogota, El Dorado international airport.

I was going to Tbilisi for Christmas and New Year celebrations and booked a ticket with a connecting flight to Paris. The whole journey was supposed to take around 18h, which is one of the longest flights I was about to take…

My first flight was scheduled to depart at 23:55 local time. I came to the airport in Bogota pretty early. I went to a business lounge and got some snacks and wine there, as I have a PriorityPass membership with the access to airport lounges.

Soon after the boarding started, I got into the plane and was waiting for the lift-off.

It doesn’t happen right away: the captain told us that the plane is fueling and we have to wait. In another 15 minutes, passengers got another message: it turned out that some avionics in the aircraft tail was not functioning and that local (Colombian) technicians are fixing it. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture from the window of what machine they were using, as I wasn’t planning to write a story about my trip...

”It will take 15 minutes” they said… It turned out that technicians were missing some tool to fix the issue and they have to fix it “manually”. In the end, about 2-3 hours after the scheduled departure we finally were airborne!

The rest of the flight went, as usual, the only issue was that we arrived 3 hours late and the gates for my connecting flights to Tbilisi close in 40 minutes.

When I got off the airplane boarding my plane was in progress and I still got a chance to catch my next flight! If only I knew what would it take to get to another gate in Charles De Gaulle Airport (CDG) in Paris…

It would not take me much to figure out which route I need to take to get to my gate B29: fortunately, there are many electronic stands and signs which guide you to the right terminal. The issue was that the needed gate was quite not next to the one I’d arrived at. After about 15 minutes of walking through long corridors to the shuttle bus stop, I finally got to the shuttle. “I still can make it,” I said to myself. The needed terminal was next to the one I was.

“Well, not so fast, Alex!” – said CDG airport transportation system. The only way how to get to the next terminal is to ride the bus through the whole airport in a circle – there is no way to get backward directly! Eventually, it took me around half an hour getting through all the other terminals and waiting on the runway for an airplane to pass.

Despite all of that, I’ve managed to remain calm and not worry about the outcome – for me this situation became an adventure.

When passing one of the runways, I noticed a Georgian airlines plane taking off and understood that there is no need to rush anymore…

And now I ended up trapped in the airport without a way to go outside, moreover, I couldn’t access a bigger part of the airport, as I had no Schengen visa and couldn’t pass any border control…

To be continued…