You Can't Get There From Here
Having just returned from a trip to the Red state in the lower right hand corner, just 90 miles from Gitmo, my main piece of advice is: avoid Miami. We won’t go into how I ended up at the Miami airport. . .we’ll just say it was a lapse in judgment. . .but I can say that I learned it’s a place to be avoided. The hard way.
My first mistake was trying to rent a car there. As often happens nowadays, you end up with a heap of luggage, sooner or later (or sometimes not), then you face the task of finding the shuttle that takes you to where the cars are. Sometimes it’s far, far away, and often, as in the case of Miami’s airport, its location is a secret. This is your first lesson: there are MANY secrets in Miami.
Eventually, you will find them (just as all bleeding stops. . .eventually). Then some serious fun begins.
It is often the case with airports that, in an effort to alleviate traffic problems, the folks who run the place have torn up all the roads and forgot to put up signs. The lady in the booth at the rental car hangar, who seemed a little put out that I had bothered her, said “Just turn left.� What she didn’t say was “Too bad you didn’t rent a Hummer, fool.� I didn’t high center the little two-wheel drive car we did rent, and the muffler wasn’t seriously damaged, but we were sorry the shocks weren’t heavy duty, and next time I’ll remember to see if some cars come with GPS.
Like ants checking every inch of the kitchen before finding the cookie jar, by going to all the places where we didn’t want to go, we eventually found the road we did want. The problem was that our vacation was now ruined: we spent the next week worrying about how were going to deal with our return trip.
When the time came, however, we returned sadder but wiser. We knew that, if we refilled the rental car gas tank at the station across of the return point, we would pay 70 cents more per gallon than at the one two miles distant. We also spent some hours poring over maps of how to approach the airport and consulting local experts, and left an extra hour to get there. This meant our cross-country trip would take a little over 16 hours door to door. . .if everything went right.
We did find the traffic exhilarating, and were able to avoid the kamikaze drivers (many of whom were disturbingly young and female, and presumably had more to live for than beating their personal best driving record by ten seconds). Loading the luggage on the shuttle, when it did show up, was good exercise, but being dropped off at the wrong end of the terminal was more conditioning than we planned on. Having walked to the other end of the terminal, we were told the flight was operated by another airline, so we walked back to where we were originally dropped. By the time we got to the right line, and were told that we could use the machine to check in (the machine decided we should leave one suitcase in Miami, so we had to reason with the counter agent).
Then it was time to stand in line for the TSAs.
Back in 2002, when they started security screening, no-fly lists, removing shoes, belts, and nail clippers from customers and hiring the n-thousand people who assure you are who you are, it occurred to me to ask “Is this really necessary?� When you think about it, no sentient being in the western world missed what happened on September 11, 2001, and how. Given that knowledge, if some Saudi Arabian young men pull out box cutters or nail files on an airplane, every person on the airplane between the ages of 6 months and 102, male AND female, will tear the Saudi gentlemen limb from limb. Think about it: would YOU let somebody hijack the airplane you are on, knowing these guys plan to crash the airplane into a building? You would not.
So we all know security screening can be challenging and time consuming, and can make you miss your flight. What we didn’t know (and a fellow in line was kind enough to show us) was that if you are in danger of missing your plane, you can go to the shorter line reserved for the first class passengers.
Eventually (there’s that word again) we did get to the airplane, which turned out to be leaving twenty minutes late. Our return trip was 25 hours long, but therefrom hangs another tail.
However, next time I fly to that lower right Red state, I’ll make sure I visit another airport.
And I’m so glad the folks from Dubai don’t run the airports. Yet.