If you have friends that work for an airline, get to know them better

After two weeks spent at a lake in the mountains with no internet, we decided to go to the beach on the other side of the country with our kids.<br><br>Because we were in such a remote spot we only had clues about what was going on in the world by listening to the news on the radio, but we weren't aware of the scale of the situation and the fact that many airlines had already stopped flying.<br><br>When we came back to civilization we tried to book a flight to the beach but everything was either already fully booked or canceled.<br><br>It was almost impossible to find a place to stay near the train station because everything was either booked or closed, it was already announced that everything closed at 8pm but the last trains were sometimes at 8.15pm which meant we were going to be stuck outside for a couple hours.<br><br>So we decided to drive the 1200 miles to the beach and sleep in the car along the way because we had no budget left to afford a hotel and didn't want to infect a hotel employee with COVID.<br><br>We were tired, hungry, and our kids were going crazy.<br><br>Hoping to find an alternative we sent a text to my wife's old high school friend, a flight attendant for a major airline, to ask for help.<br><br>The day before we were going to leave the reply arrived, she was working in Paris that week and although there were no flights left to book, she was allowed to book a flight for the four of us for virtually nothing, since we were the only passengers on board.<br><br>We landed in a city that's only 90 miles from our destination with the sea breeze in our face, and just for a second it felt like we had left this madness behind.