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A travel story: July, 2001, France (Dinan, maybe? I can't remember). My wife, my daughter, and I have walked a couple miles from the train station to the hotel. I took the bags to the room and my wife made arrangements for us to leave the hotel early the next morning. Morning comes, we pack up, and find all the hotel's outside doors locked. It seems my wife was not paying attention when the desk clerk explained how we could get out 1 specific door. Since it was an old hotel, it had an emergency key in a glass box by each door. I proceeded to extract the key and get the back door open. I made it down to the parking lot to find that a locked gate with razor wire on top prevented us from going any farther. As I was going back upstairs I noticed a lady across the alley staring at me. At this point we had already missed our bus which was to take us to next town's train station. I was yelling at my wife. She was yelling at someone on the phone. My daughter was crying. A cab driver was yelling at us from outside the building, as he had been trying to get us out. Finally, the translation clicked and my wife figured out what door to use. We climbed into the cab and took off. This is where things got pleasantly strange. The cab driver said he knew what bus we needed, so he took off after it. Along the way we passed the police who appeared to be on the way to our hotel. I never found out, but I assume the lady across the alley called them about me. The cabbie caught the bus and pretty much forced it to stop. The bus driver actually let us on. As it turned out, we were on a local bus instead of an express, so we missed our train connection to Paris. However, when we got to the train station, the bus driver took us by the hand and delivered us to a ticket agent who got us a spot on the next train. Amazingly, they also gave us money back because we took the cheaper bus! So, all-in-all, a very stressful morning but we got to Paris no more than 1 hour later than we had planned.
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