Today I got an email with all our French Open tickets attached! Hooray!

The first thing I did was translate the entire ticket since it’s in French and I needed to know why all the tickets have my name on them when they clearly show an illustration of someone checking IDs. Turns out I just have to change the names online and they will be registered correctly in the computer when the ticket is scanned. Check.

My next challenge was to find a good seating chart so I know where we’ll be sitting. Apparently, the organizers for Roland Garros have something against straightforward information about just where exactly your seats are. I could only find zone colors, no mention of the other qualification, OB/NB, on the tickets.

After looking all over the official website and various other ticketing aggregators, I decided to just make my own seating chart (hopefully helping out a few other folks) combined from several maps I found.

Behold!

So now I know where our tickets are!

(Here you go, Mom.)

June 2, 2008 (2 men’s singles/1 men’s doubles) - OB, Row 20, Seats 4, 6, 8, 10
June 3, 2008 (1 men’s singles/2 women’s singles) - NB, Row 5, Seats 60, 62, 64, 66

I previously wrote about how long we were going to have to wait before we found out if we actually got the French Open tickets we bought registered in advance for last November.

Well, the wait is over!

On Saturday, after Eric discovered a large charge on our credit card, we realized that the ticket purchase must have gone through. I logged into the Roland Garros site and happily found that the tickets we were issued were just what we wanted. Four tickets for the Suzanne Lenglen court, zone red (the best!), for both June 2 & 3!

This meant that we needed to scramble to buy plane tickets from Barcelona to Paris (we had to wait on this part as plane tickets are never refundable, at least the kind we buy) and find a hotel, mere weeks before our arrival. We made out fine, thankfully, so now I get to figure how much of Paris we can realistically see in the four days we’ll be there, minus the two dedicated to tennis, of course.

Expect lots of photos of us covered in red dust from Paris. :)

So far, we only have one big trip planned for this year, but (of course) that can change at a moment’s notice with us! :)

Eric has a conference in Barcelona in early June, so he came up with the idea for us to try and get tickets for the second week of the French Open, thereby starting our trip in Paris for a few days before heading south to Spain. (We still haven’t decided on train or plane for this portion of the trip, so suggestions/advice are welcome.)

We had to wait a few months before the tickets went on sale, so in November when the process opened, we registered and excitedly filled in the information for our tickets. Four tickets for Suzanne Lenglen on both June 2 and June 3. We plan for Eric’s parents to meet us in France as this is the only way my mom-in-law will get my dad-in-law to take her to Paris, finally. :)

I was surprised to see the following email in my inbox less than 10 minutes later…

“Order processing and allocation of tickets will take place from the end of March 2008. We will contact you again by mail beginning of April to inform you of the result of your request.”

Huh? I have to wait until April to know if I even have tickets?!? Grrr.

As that leaves us less than 60 days before we have to leave for our trip, we may have to approach our travel plans a bit differently. Not that I would mind a few days in Paris, but the main purpose of the trip will be to attend the French Open. The good news is that we got in early in terms of the order request, so I have to believe that we’ll at least get the days we want. The bad news is that I’ve never done this before, so who knows what will actually happen.

Sigh. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. Stay tuned!

April 15 update: we got our tickets! :)