The airport gauntlet

I'm home safely. The plane flight was uneventful and only ten minutes late. Lunch at the airport was from Au Bon Pain, which is real food (as opposed to much of what you buy to eat at airports).

What made today's travel special was getting to the other side of airport security.

The fun started at the hotel. We waited for the slightly late hotel shuttle. When it arrived, three fans lumbered out behind us. They were wheeling a hotel cart jammed to overflowing with luggage, and two of them were a great deal wider than I am. The shuttle had three seats open--as long as you were willing to cram three people into a space only two were occupying in any other row. The driver was willing to try to squeeze all five of us into the van. The thought of half an hour with someone else's fat warming me was more than I could take.

We paid the ten buck premium for a taxi.

On the way out of security on Thursday, we'd noticed a block-long line to get past the checkpoint. So, we'd planned appropriately and arrived early. We'd also learned that an outage at DFW was affecting airports all over the country, and that PHL was foggy, but that was okay; we were way, way early.

The line, of course, was two blocks long. No problem. We had a bottle of water, we knew what was coming, and so we stood patiently. We stood some more. Eventually, we made it inside the security maze, around several turns, and to the last cattle chute before the actual check-in machines. Success was in sight.

The power went out. Not the whole airport's power, mind you; that would have been too general. No, just the power for the security machines. This torture was ours.

So, TSA routed us back out of the maze, down a hall, down some stairs, outside in the rain for a block, up an escalator, and into another security area...which already had a block-long line before we and our fellow passengers descended on it.

So, we waited another long stretch, made it to the maze, entered the maze, caught a break and got routed to a short line, actually put our stuff in bins...and were cut off by a series of angry senior citizens frustrated with the process.

After enough of them had passed through the machines, our turns came, and from there on it was smooth sailing.

I heart airports.