The good news is we got back to the US around 2pm. The bad news is that to do it, we went to bed at 3pm PDT and woke up at 6:30 pm PDT (or 11pm to 2:30am in Portugal's time zone).
We were concerned about our connection in Paris since we find that internal flights frequently get bused to gates and we only had 1.5 hours between flights, plus we had to go through passport control. However, we landed at an actual gate, the passport wait only took 5 minutes, and we were in a closer terminal than usual. The flight was somewhat delayed because of a problem with a water chiller, so we did arrive a little later than scheduled.
Once we landed, we discovered that the Global Entry process is now a single screen instead of several. The hardest part was figuring out that I had to get shorter to be close enough to the camera to have my face fill the screen image. That was it -- it printed a photo, we waited for about a minute for the photo to be compared to our passports and faces and we were in. No questions about how much we spent and if we were bringing in food. No forms handed out in the airplane.
We collected our car from Erika and Jesse and headed home by way of the grocery store. It is totally unusual for us to have anything fresh in the fridge after a long trip, so being able to relax in the evening and be ready to cook breakfast the next day was a treat.
I did discover that one disadvantage of having a mechanical knee is that I trigger virtually every screening device and have to allow time to get wanded and patted down. However, being able to walk freely without pain definitely makes the occasional pat down a small price to pay.
We had a wonderful time and now we have a full day to readjust to CA time, do the laundry, catch up on email, snail mail, and finances so we can start working for the county elections department on Friday, training for our new roles as Vote Center Coordinators.
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