The trip to east Texas on Monday was pleasant and uneventful. The last encounter with the smiling faces (that's a joke, but not much funny about those people who are employed by the gov'mint, so as taxpayer I actually help employ to harass and mistreat traveling citizens and the otherwise undocumented) of TSA workers, I kinda felt like a potential terrorist: having been singled out for their personal attention. Probably due to failure to completely empty pants pockets while traversing security at ATL. You have to wonder if the first question on the job application is 'do you have a sense of humor?', and if they answer in the affirmative - they are immediately disqualified from employment. I am sure they hear too many excuses and comments that are meant to be amusing but turn out to be grounds for the traveler to be grounded, but they could at least smile and have some decent customer service skills.
My Presbyterian friend and I left Columbus about 9:00 a.m., to drive to Decatur and leave for the airport at 11:30. She, unaccustomed to travel, was pretty anxious about the whole venture. I do not think she has ever flown without a family member. She is in her mid-80's and twice widowed/single, fairly easily persuaded to want to go to TX to visit her son and family. Has not traveled by air in years, and was completely unfamiliar with the process of going through post-9/11 security. She has a son who is a flight attendant, and since she provided me with several bits of travel advice, so I assumed he had cautioned her about limitations of acceptable items in carry-ons. The worst problem we had was having her can of hairspray consficated by baggage checkers. I suspect that fact that it was metal brought it to their attention when her luggage went through the scanner - and then the guy who rummaged through her belongings said it was 'over-sized', and not approved to travel in the cabin. Not sure what part of the 85 year old, grey-haired woman looked suspicious, but she was not sufficiently persuasive about fly-away, frizzy hair to allow him to release her contraband hairspray. We got through that, to our gate and off the ground.
We parted ways at the Dallas/Ft. Worth terminal, where her son met her, and the cousins picked me up to drive back east to their home. Enjoyed the stay, visiting, eating, doing mostly nothing,eating, reading, eating. In order to avoid very early morning rising and misery of early morning traffic, I spent Wednesday night in a motel near D/FW to be able to catch the 8:30 return flight.
That's where the story gets interesting.
I know the airlines recommend travelrersd arrive at the terminal two hours ahead of the departure time, but I figured: I can see the terminal from here - so if I get on the shuttle that leaves the motel at 7:00 for an 8:30 flight that would be plenty of time. The shuttle driver was about ten minutes after 7:00 getting to the motel, and the other riders dragggggeeeeddd themselves out the door and up the steps onto the van. They obviously were not pacing the sidewalk (like me!), concerned about getting through security to catch an 8:30 departure. The driver asked where we were going to be sure she got us all to the proper terminal for boarding... this is Not Atlanta, where everyone goes down the same rabbit hole, no matter what carrier you have tickets for: terminals are scattered all over the place with overhead trams (similar to Marta) or contractor shuttles to take passengers from A to B or D (or maybe even X, Y, Z ?) to make connections.
The driver put the Asian young people off at terminal D, and I thought: 'oh, good, E is next'. But then she circled around a huge parking deck and returned to D again, to let the other passenger off. Roadways are so very confusing: worse that that Moreland Interchange in northeast Atlanta by a factor of at least 10 due to terminals and parking decks being packed together - if I had been on my own, I would still be wandering around lost.
After some minutes of working through the ins and outs of one-way access, she finally let me off at E and I dashed up the escalator, thankful I was virtually unencumbered with luggage, traveling with only a backpack full of dirty clothes and my paperback book. But when I got inside, I could not find my traveling companion. At this point it is about 7:35 and I know that the boarding can start as early as 7:45, so my co-hort is either hopelessly lost, muddling around in the innards of the terminal in tears, or being held hostage by TSA, or freaked out that I might miss the flight. And the information desk guy said that the airline was not allowed to let me know if she had already checked in/printed her boarding pass. All I could do was hope she was at the gate instead of lost in the maze of D/FW.
So I went to get in the line to wend my way through security - only to discover it was backed up about 100 people. I knew I was in serious trouble. I don't really get around all that much - esp. in the sky, and have never faced the possibility of missing a flight - but that 'free breakfast' I had at the motel was churning in my stomach. I overheard an airport worker tell someone in line ahead of me that if she would make the trek to the next terminal there would be no waiting in line. So I followed her: back down the escalator to lower level, outdoors, through a construction site, along a 'temporary' sidewalk made of plywood sheets, hemmed in with orange cones and plastic fencing to what I assume was terminal F. Up the escalator and backtrack to the gate.All the time wondering if my travel co-hort was waiting for me, or lost in the inner workings of D/FW.
There she was, sitting at the gate, with about 90 other people (plenty of crying babies), wringing her hands wondering about Me! I think I looked out the porthole/window through the cloud cover as we were crossing over the Mississippi River, which was pretty neat. Return flight: uneventful, after getting off to a shaky start.
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