Sunday, September 16, 2007

Things I Learned on Summer Vacay at the Airport

By Ryn Gargulinski
At Tucson International Airport:
Do NOT book a 2 p.m. flight out of Tucson during the summer. Mid-afternoon is prime monsoon zone, especially on a Saturday with a crowded airport. Your options will be to wait it out, missing any connecting flight and becoming stranded at whatever city the next flight dumps you in, or to go back home and try again the following day at 7 a.m. There’s nothing like a Sunday 5 a.m. drive to the Tucson airport. It was quite pleasant, actually. The only time driving 10 miles or so in Tucson took less than an hour.

At New York’s LaGuardia Airport:
Do NOT fly out of this mess. Although I’ve always touted LaGuardia above Kennedy or Newark, I now don’t know why. When they say to arrive two hours before your flight, they are definitely not kidding. That’s exactly how long it took to wait in the snaking lines that had no real direction, check in a single bag (which you have to haul over to the x-ray machine yourself) and then stand for 45 minutes with your shoes off on cold airport floor while the man in front of you, who came clad in brass belt buckle, large spurred cowboy boots and a 10-gallon supply of metal jewelry, removes all things that make the metal detector beep. A plus at LaGuardia, however, was watching the really angry German man in a San Juan T-shirt argue with the airline workers about bringing 22 carry-ons on board.

At Detroit Metro Airport:
While most of it’s new, gleaming and sprawling, there’s a dinky little downstairs area that looked like it was constructed in 1953. You first have to find the stairwell to the bowels of the building, where you will also find security offices and big signs that say DO NOT ENTER and EXPLOSIVES INSIDE. Instead of the snaking enclosed walkway from the terminal into the plane, you will have a set of rickety stairs they wheel around to tiny aircraft. That’s where planes to New York fly out of.

On Airplanes in General:
The seats got smaller, the delays got longer and they no longer serve free, 9,000-calorie meals. Many of the seats pockets are missing barf bags, something I know since I use them as drawing paper. And unless you’ve bulked up on Airborne, Echinacea, vitamin C and other substances to make your immune system as impenetrable as armor, you’re going to get sick. Recycled air, jet fuel fumes and sitting for hours next to someone hacking up phlegm tends to do that to you. I ended up with an upper respiratory infection that floored me for three weeks, thereby eliminating any marathon running I had intended during my vacation.

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