It was the last leg of our European trip and we were headed for three days in Paris. Our instructions came shortly before our stay; check-in times seemed to change every time I got another e-mail. We had to wait nearly an hour in a laundromat to get our keys. We took a second taxi to the apartment building. Charlotte said that her apartment was on the 2nd floor. We’ve traveled often enough in Europe to know that means that the apartment would be on the American third floor but the key would not open the door. She was not being helpful in her messages and my phone was running out of power. We finally tried one more idea: go down one level below and try the key. It worked.
The apartment was spacious and nicely decorated but we were shocked to see many sticky notes on cabinets and doors saying “don’t open” and “don’t touch”. One of them was on the large refrigerator. When we opened the doors, both the freezer and refrigerator were full of taped up bins of food. My husband loves to cook but there was no room in the refrigerator for us to add our own so the supermarket was out of the question. On our third day our hostess dropped a bomb on us. We’d told her way ahead of time that we were leaving very early on the next morning, 4:30am, to head to the airport. She said that we’d have to travel to a train station in another part of the city to return the keys. We wrote that it was impossible to do so, but she insisted. We’ve never been in a position like this before and we’ve stayed at many airbnbs over the decades. Normally we just leave the keys on the table and lock the door behind us. There was no way that we could run this errand, especially since we’d be carrying our six bags. This demand could make us miss our flight so we told her in an e-mail that we were going to leave that evening at 6:30pm and if someone didn’t come for the keys, we’d leave them on the table. We booked a hotel close to the airport and hailed a taxi. We asked for a refund for the last day because we had to stay and pay for a hotel elsewhere but we haven’t heard anything from her.