Unlike the biblical son, our bag has not returned. After being advised by American Airlines that we could retrieve it at Baggage Claim, we made the hour drive to Philadelphia airport, waited in the obligatory line only to be told it would be ‘several hours’ to get the bag out of storage.

Sigh…three hours spent trying to retrieve it was enough. We are rolling the dice (again) and hoping the bag is waiting for us when we land in Paris. If it isn’t, we may be doing more shopping – and spending a lot more Euros! – than we intended.

As Jim noted earlier, we unfortunately will have to forego the Mont St. Michel portion of our Normandy visit because of our re-arranged travel dates. And to our surprise, our tour company couldn’t accommodate our new dates in the original tour we had planned (Omaha and Utah beaches) – so I guess there are other people crazy enough to go to Normandy in March.

As an alternative, we’re booked on an Omaha Beach/Band of Brothers tour. I had read Stephen Ambrose’s “D-Day” in preparation for the trip, but neither Jim nor I had read Band of Brothers. So guess what we’re watching as we while away our three days stuck in New Jersey? Yes, we’ll be Band of Brothers experts when we hit the D-Day beaches.

As a friend of ours commented on a recent Facebook post about this trip, we do try to make lemonade out of lemons. Hopefully that won’t be necessary once we undertake “Paris Part Deux.”