Day 2 — Monday, 2/1/2026 — Day Two… or Déjà Vu?

I checked my bag for my flight to Atlanta and headed to security. They stopped me, saying there was no flight under my name in the system. I showed them my boarding pass, but they shrugged — nothing they could do, I needed to go back to the ticket booth.

So back I went to the airline counter. They asked for my passport, and that’s when I realized… I didn’t have it. I checked all my pockets, my luggage — everywhere — and couldn’t find it.

After tearing through everything, the agent looked up my reservation with my ID instead and insisted I was fine — I had a ticket and boarding pass and should not need anything else. She signed my boarding pass and sent me back to security.

By then, my brain was spiraling:

You’re going to miss your trip. Your passport is gone forever. I will have to cancel your whole trip. I am going to lose all the money and time I put into this trip and I will never get to France.

When I reached security again, the woman who’d spoken to me earlier waved at me. She was holding my passport. I almost cried from relief right there.

A Race Through Airports

The flight to Atlanta was delayed, and there I was — running like I’m in a movie through the airport — so I nearly missed my connection to Paris. Once I finally arrived in Paris, I realized my boarding pass to Montpellier didn’t have a gate. I checked the big board and found the flight, but getting to the gate meant dragging my suitcase up and down stairs because apparently, escalators are optional in France.

Bathrooms, too, apparently.

I settled at my gate, only to leave again — dragging my suitcase up and down stairs again — just to use the bathroom in the main terminal.

While checking the board one last time, I noticed the flight number was different from the one on my boarding pass. The airline representative said sometimes flight numbers change, but she would double‑check.

She came back with news I should’ve expected by that point: there were two flights to Montpellier, and I was at the gate for the wrong one. The correct flight was about to depart.

So once again, I was running up more stairs with my suitcase. Thankfully, the terminals weren’t far apart, and I made it just in time.