Fifteen hours is not enough time to see Paris, especially when you arrive at 3pm and need to be at the airport by 6.30am the following morning. We only have ourselves and our poor booking skills to blame. C’est la vie – or as Ned Kelly would say it, such is life.

Determined to make the most of our limited time, we start our journée parisienne (day in Paris) at a jaunty pace, leaving our hotel in Bercy Village in our wake.  We follow the flow of the Seine River, walking north along the bank.

The skies are cloudless and iridescently blue. The sun, eager to impress on the first day of Summer, shines brightly. It’s 24 degrees.

We walk about 20,000+ steps around Paris and hit as many of the tourist spots as possible.  The street names, the monuments and the places look so familiar, thanks to Instagram and the movies, yet they’re also very different in real life.  We sit by the Seine drinking wine, watching sleek speed boats dashing along the river, their polished timber decks gleaming.  As we walk, there’s a procession of glass-canopied ferries, each filled with tourists on the obligatory sightseeing cruise of the Seine. The reconstruction of the Notre Dame is on-going, so we take a photo to mark its progress.  I’m surprised how desolate the grounds of the Louvre are. The fountain isn’t working. The Champs-Élysées is chaotic, a never-ending cacophony of cars, horns and scooters, regardless of the time of day. Le Jardin des Tuileries is magnifique, with its perfect symmetry of trees, fountains and statues. We stroll along Avenue Montaigne, where fashion’s biggest names are accommodated in elegant buildings constructed in the 1850s.

But by early evening, I can feel a juicy blister under one toe, and we’re sleep deprived after spending 24 hours in transit and travelling 18,000km or so. Under the last rays of the fading sun (about 9.40pm), we make our way to the metro where we catch the number 6 line back to our hotel. C’est la vie.

The morning alarm clock goes off, and we catch an Uber to Orly Airport, located to the south of the city.

Airports are stressful.  They’re big and busy and each one has a different security protocol. We check in at Vueling Air (a low-cost Spanish airline) for our next leg to Malaga Spain, only to find that our travel agent has somehow managed to forget to include our luggage. Vueling charge us an additional 100 Euro (c’est la vie) but at least now, we have our boarding passes.

The Orly security clearance includes the normal humiliation of partially undressing, being swabbed for explosives, and having complete strangers rummage through your luggage.  C’est la vie.

When we travel, Rosco and I have clear and distinct roles.  Rosco oversees navigations and transportations (he’s like a homing pigeon with an innate ability to know where he is in any location, it’s weird, but I’m grateful). I’m in charge of passports, boarding passes and travel documents, due to Rosco’s well-known ability to lose most things that aren’t physically attached to him.  But on this occasion, for whatever reason, I don’t wrest Rosco’s boarding pass from his hand once we clear security.

About 15 minutes before boarding Rosco asks me for his boarding pass, which of course I don’t have.  Trouble is, he doesn’t have it either.  How does one lose a boarding pass in such a short amount of time?

We suspect it happened in the men’s toilets, although the exact details remain unclear. Rosco came back from said toilets, explaining in his typically animated way, that a woman was mopping and cleaning in and around the men at the urinal, mid-stream, so to speak. “I bet there’s nothing she hasn’t seen” he points out. Perhaps in Rosco’s frantic attempts to adjust clothing, maintain modesty and keep the cleaning woman from seeing the family jewels, the boarding pass fell from his pocket? 

Grinning like a lunatic, Rosco cheerfully tells me it’s not the first time he’s lost a boarding pass.  His attitude is so laissez faire. ‘They’ll just print me another one”!

Whilst they did, indeed, just print him another one, it took ten long minutes, while other passengers streamed past us, boarding the flight.  We tried to look innocent whilst three harried Vueling staff attempted to undo Rosco’s laissez faire attitude by muttering in French, scowling at his passport, and making aggressive computer keystrokes.

Eventually, a replacement boarding pass was flourished, and with a duet of pardons and merci beaucoups, we slink off into the tunnel and onto our flight.  Yet, the Vueling staff had the last laugh, by seating us apart from each other, with me in the dreaded middle seat. C’est la vie.

And thus ends our 15 hours in Paris. Next time we’ll have more time to wander aimlessly through wide, elegant boulevards and narrow, cobblestone streets, to eat haute cuisine at traditional Parisian brasseries, and enjoy fine wines poured by grumpy, efficient waiters.

But until then, vive la France.