Air France sucks!

September 10th 2015: my Mother (a "senior") is to fly back from the San Francisco area (where I live) to Mauritius Island (where she lives) with a 5-hour layover in Paris. Mauritius is pretty much at the antipodes of San Francisco; each flight (SFO -> CDG, CDG -> MRU) is about 10-11 hours long. This is a tough trip, even for me.

That morning she gets an email from Air France: AF83, from SFO to CDG, has been cancelled, she will fly the next day (9/11) on a replacement flight and will arrive one day late in Mauritius. No explanation whatsoever.

Let's summarize the disruption:
- her whole trip is delayed by 1 day
- Luckily she's staying with family in San Francisco. Did Air France arrange hotel nights for other passengers?
- the layover time in Paris increases from 5 to 10 hours
- the replacement SFO to CDG flight arrives in Paris at 6AM (Paris time, that is 9PM San Francisco time) instead of 11AM for the flight she had booked. Her replacement flight to Paris is basically a day flight in San Francisco time and she will have to wait 10 hours in CDG right when she's supposed to be sleeping. With the original flight she had booked she would have been able to sleep about 5 hours in the plane and she would have had much less time to spend in the airport.

Did Air France offer ANYTHING to soften the disruption? No.

We called Air France in the US, prior to her departure and asked if she could be given access to the Air France lounge in CDG so that she can rest (a really low cost minimal "favor", compared to paying hotel nights to stranded passengers...) . Answer: we can't do anything for you, you'll have to ask the ground crew in once in Paris. Once there, email from my mom: negative answer again - it's against the "rules".

Air France is losing money. With that kind of service, may they be wiped out, sooner than later.

Practical panniers for e-bike rear racks with thick tubes

I recently purchased a Benelli Classica e-bike which my wife uses for commuting.
Like many other e-bikes, its rear rack comes, for some reason, with very thick tubes: in this case, I measured a diameter of about 18mm.

This is well beyond what most common bike pannier brands, using clamps for attachment, can support. The standard limit tends to be around 12mm, with a few options up to 14-16mm.

What are the solutions?
Some pannier systems use straps (eg Thule) rather than clamps. Unfortunately in my case, the rack, more aesthetic than practical, could not fit them well (and hold the bag safely in place).

Changing the rack? Not obvious to me and possibly expensive.

The only solution I found: Ortlieb QL2.1. The standard clamps support up to 16mm tubing, but can be replaced with 20mm clamps (separate accessory #E193).

The Ortlieb QL3 system is limited to 10mm tubing with an accessory (#E195) that can only deal with 14mm tubing.
The Arkel system is limited to 15mm racks.

The Ortlieb 20mm clamps I got are a bit loose but I worked around this problem by applying a few layers of transparent surface guard tape on the rack where my wife hooks the clamps.

I did notify the e-bike maker; they were aware of the issue... Let's hope they stick to say 14mm max for their future products!