You’re all packed. You’ve decanted all your essential fluids into bottles small enough to appease the TSA. Downloaded a couple of intriguing-sounding books to your Kindle, and packed some nutritious snacks. Checked in online, and arranged to be picked up by the airport shuttle service with the best reviews on Yelp. You’re good to go….
Everyone, including this American boy, agrees that Ramsgate, about as far east as one can go in Great Britain without plunging into the English Channel, is an odd place for an American boy to be living. I think it’s an odd place for anyone to be living, given the rapacity of the seagulls and the…
This past week, an American Airlines flight from LAX to JFK made an emergency landing in Kansas City after an obstreperous female passenger somehow made the flight crew feel jeopardized by refusing to cease performing songs associated with the late Whitney Houston. Video footage taken by another passenger (in spite of one of the jeopardized-feeling…
You know what they say. Be careful what you wish for. That’s what I would say to passengers who like to pick fights. I don’t mean legitimate talk about a problem or even a bit of venting after a hard travel day. I mean people who deal with a bad day by spreading it around….
I find that I remember particular vacations primarily on the basis of what I read on them. Reminiscing earlier about my and my bride’s visit to Cyprus, I realized that I remember reading Jonathan Franzen’s sublime The Corrections very much more vividly than anything else about our week there. I can remember reading a scene…
Aside from the time I and Original Wife realized ourselves passengers on a bus on which a psychopath with a very large knife was riding, my most awful travel experience took place on the island of Cyprus. Second Wife and I had booked ourselves onto a minivan tour of the Greek portion of the island,…
Once having gotten away from the clamor and commercialization of Honolulu, it’s hard to have a rotten time on Oahu, but I managed it, with a little help from a guy who looked, in his wild hair and beard and indigent’s attire, more like the frontman of the popular ’70s British progressive rock act Jethro…
It’s true that the job can be thankless, but it’s also a rare tool, rich in unique rewards. In what other job can you control your own schedule – and fill that free time with high-minded hobbies or outrageous mobility?…
I suspect that few visitors to the largest of the Canary Islands arrive by air without thinking of Tenerife having been the site of the deadliest accident in aviation history, one in which 583 persons died when a pair of Boeing 747s collided. The good news is that the runway on which the collision took…
You have of course heard of TSA Pre✓™, whereby actual Americans who fly frequently on participating airlines, or are members of one of the Customs and Border Protection’s ultra-elite Trusted Traveler programs, don’t have to wait interminably with the riff-raff to be screened at select airports. Instead, they get to breeze through special TSA Pre✓™…
