The IT Nerd

This is the first time since 2019 that my wife and I have gone on any sort of trip. And this one was started out big, and then was scaled back because we don’t trust airlines at the moment. Lots more on that in a bit.

So here’s the plan: Rather than flying into Paris and doing the usual Paris things, we instead went into a different direction. We would be staying in the Rhone Alps instead, see the sights that tourists don’t usually see, and catch a Tour de France stage. To us that was far more interesting. So we booked our flights back in April to make this happen.

Let’s start with the flights, we needed to fly from Toronto to Lyon France. And there isn’t a non-stop flight from to Lyon, it meant that we had to make a stop along the way. When I booked our flights, I decided to go from Toronto to Amsterdam, then from Amsterdam to Lyon on KLM. The return flight would be on Air France which is fine as KLM and Air France are owned by the same people. But it would go from Lyon to Paris, and then from Paris to Toronto. That was a great plan, but the problem with this scheme was that there was only 1 hour and 10 minutes between landing in Amsterdam and taking off to Lyon. That was further shortened by the fact that the plane from Toronto to Amsterdam was late getting into Toronto. Which meant it was late leaving Toronto. Which then meant that by the time we landed in Amsterdam, we only had 25 minutes to catch our connecting flight to Lyon. The net result of that was that we made the flight, but our suitcases did not. They were sitting in Amsterdam which we confirmed via a pair of AirTags that we put into the bags prior to our departure.

Here is one of the AirTags that we used along with the Belkin Secure Holder With Cable. It’s secure because to assemble it, you need to use an Allen key (which is included) to do so. That combined with the steel cable that is braided makes them harder to get rid of. We figured that if someone really wanted to steal our luggage, they would have to work harder to get rid of the AirTag if they noticed that it was there if they opened it up. And since the luggage that we use has a TSA lock, it’s locked all the time. Thus if they steal the luggage, we can track it and have a chance of recovering it.

A quick word about AirTags and travel. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, this is a must have as it helps to hold airlines accountable for your luggage. Something that we used to our advantage as when the luggage did not appear on the carousel after the flight. We marched to the KLM luggage lost and found, we were able to show the person at the desk exactly where the bags were at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam when they said it would take days to find our luggage. Because of the fact that we could basically live track our luggage from 800 KM’s away, they were on the next flight to Lyon and arrived three hours after we did. The way I read this interaction is that if we didn’t have AirTags in our luggage, KLM would not have acted immediately to get our luggage back to us. That says something about the power of having AirTags. No wonder why Lufthansa wanted to ban them on their flights. Oh, by the way, KLM compensated us 20 Euros in the form of vouchers for losing our bags. We used them to grab some food at Lyon airport.

Whoop. Whoop. #Sarcasm

I’ll foreshadow something for you at this time. This would not be the last time that KLM and sister airline Air France would lose our luggage. More on that in a few days.

Since we had three hours to kill, the next thing that my wife and I had to do is to find local SIM cards because as frequent readers of this blog know, you’re wasting your money by using the roaming functionality of a Canadian telco. To illustrate this, let me show you the SIM card that my wife and I got:

This is a European wide SIM card from Bouygues Telecom. And for your 39 Euros, you get the following:

• Unlimited calls
• Unlimited texts
• 30 GB of data
• Up to 4G service (I’ve seen 3G pop up on my phone a few times)
• A local French phone number

Now 39 Euros is $58 CDN. Rogers, TELUS, or Bell cannot compete with this. To illustrate this, I checked what TELUS who is my current mobile phone carrier offered for roaming (To be clear, I am not picking on TELUS as if you check Rogers and Bell, their costs for roaming are similar):

So I would be paying $16 CDN a day, plus all of these extras if I don’t have their Easy Roam option on my account. Since I am here for 8 days, that works out to $128 CDN before taxes. Using this European wide SIM is less than half that price. So in effect, using this SIM starts to pay for itself after four days if you look at it from the perspective of the money that you save by buying it versus going with the TELUS option. So unless you really, really, REALLY needed to have people access you by your Canadian number, you’d be insane to use the roaming plans of Rogers, TELUS or Bell for your roaming needs.

By the way, when you purchase this SIM card you get this:

If you look at the top left, the SIM card eject tool is in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Nice touch. In any case, you simply pop the SIM card into your unlocked phone and you’re good to go. And you will get a text message confirming that you’re live with a French number. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

Once our luggage arrived in Lyon, our next stop was our car rental. Months in advance I had booked this beauty:

This is the Peugeot 2008 and our copy came out of the box with a 1.2 L “PureTech” Petro engine mated to an eight-speed automatic. I’ll have more driving impressions in a later update about this trip, but during the drive from Lyon Airport to the village that we’re staying in it handled extremely well and had a decent amount of power which surprised me seeing as the displacement was only 1.2L.

Because of the delay related to our luggage, we got to the town that we were staying in late. Thus I will have to wait until tomorrow to give you all those details, along with what we did on our first day in France. Stay tuned for that.