What Has Happened to Travelling?

Travel used to be an adventure!  It was exciting to get on a plane and go somewhere different, explore, dine, go for an event….a chance to extract yourself from your daily routine to have a vacation, mini or regular.  Not any more!

I just returned from a wedding in Toronto that we planned to be a travel adventure and a chance to reconnect with our friends and their family and be a part of a wonderful weekend. 

Boy, was I disappointed!

Traveling anywhere is now not an adventure, but rather a gauntlet!  Maybe it’s simply that the romance I associated with traveling was never as great as I had imagined.  Rather, I think it is because the conditions have changed in the industry(specifically in the air travel industry), and frankly, there are just too many damned people going everywhere!

Our trip to Toronto required that we have an interim stop in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Apparently American Airlines has its hub there and unless you have a non-stop direct flight to a major metropolitan center like New York, Chicago or LA, you must change planes in Charlotte.  The actual flight to Charlotte from RSW (Fort Myers) was pretty good.  American’s equipment is clean and has more leg room than other airlines like Delta or United which crams you into smaller and smaller spaces unless you pay extra for the privilege of being able to get out of the window seat without making the other two passengers seated next to you get up and move out into the aisle.  Maybe the least the other carriers could do is provide catheters so you can dump your excreta right there at your seat!  (Although then they would have to provide clinical catheter rooms at the airport to install them in everyone, so nix that idea!)

The really nightmarish part of this experience was the scene at Charlotte’s Douglass Airport!  The layout of the Charlotte airport was conceived by long distance sprinters with spaghetti for brains!  It is a real challenge to make it to other gates in time if there is the least bit of human congestion….and believe me there is plenty of that!  Literally hordes of humans make a direct path impossible.  Dodging and weaving between all the bags and people is horrible.  I tripped at least 3 or 4 times because people are really pretty rude when they are in a hurry. 

Then there is the condition of the infrastructure at this airport.  Concourse C is literally under construction and renovation from start to finish.  Cardboard covered floors alternating with stretches of cement, open ceilings with ductwork and wires everywhere, and unpleasant noise from air-conditioning not sound protected make the experience untenable.  If it rains, you can multiply the misery by at least twice.

There were no delays on the outbound trip, so the layover for us was ONLY 2.5 hours!  The return trip was another story.

There was apparently a thunderstorm during our incoming return flight, which necessitated a ‘hold’ for only about 30 minutes.  Our chatty captain told us that planes were being stacked up in holding patterns at the 4 corners of the airport’s airspace 50 miles out in all directions, with a total of about 80 aircraft suddenly thrown off schedule, which meant that all the connections got messed up as well.  When we finally landed, the airport was like a colony of human bacilli!  Since the concourse was under construction there was only one set of bathrooms available and the lines were interminable.  Good luck if you had cramps!

Our flight was being rescheduled as we watched the only flight board in the concourse being re-shuffled.  Our departure went from 7:55pm to 9:25pm to 10:03pm while we stood there!  Multiply that by 20 odd gates at just this concourse, and there are 5 of them, and you get the picture.  There were lines all the way into the concourse at the American Flight service desk that required a wait of anywhere from 30-60 minutes until you could get someone to talk to you face to face to try to re-route you or give you some updated information.

Since my wife was sick from something she caught on the plane on the way up to Toronto, the prospect of us sitting in this hellhole of an airport for the next 2+ hours waiting for a flight that might not even happen was too much to bear.  I stood in line for an hour to get re-ticketed to fly out of Charlotte the next morning.  Of course the airline declined to pay for our hotel room.  They did agree to reschedule us at no charge however, which was the least they could do.

So we finally got to a close-by Holiday Inn for the night and got a decent night’s sleep.  First thing at 7:30 we were on the hotel shuttle back to the ‘flight pit’ for another running of the gauntlet!  At 8:00am the airport was at least civilized in terms of the crowds, but over the next 60 minutes as we waited to board our flight, the human swarm increased 5 fold to give us this environment:

We are talking 9:00am!  I am sure the rest of the day was no better.  My only advice is to do whatever you can to stay away from this airport.  Fly another airline.  Any blip in the weather results in the chaos I have just described, and I have to believe that this is almost a daily occurrence.

The trip to Toronto was a revelation in terms of the human congestion that exists in that city.  The weather was grey, cold and rainy for 90% of our time there.  While I can only compliment the city planners for their use of mass transit and fully operation traffic signals complete with countdown clocks, the sheer press of human presence is overwhelming! The traffic is bumper to bumper in most parts of the city, and the condition of the roads is abominable!  Potholes bigger than anything I saw in my 30 years of living in New York dot the streets and you don’t see them until you are on top of them.  I chose to rent a car at the airport, which after my recent experience in Kingston, Jamaica, teaches me I should have been severely spanked!  Since the rules of the road are identical to the US, it was at least navigable, but the traffic was really horrible at or near rush hour.

Maybe it’s just that living in Naples, Florida has spoiled me, but it just seems like there are too many people out there!.....especially in the larger cities.  The people in Toronto were especially courteous at all times, but even the highways were jammed like you would see in a cartoon!

The event we attended in Toronto was a delightful wedding, but every experience surrounding the event was jammed with people in too small spaces.

I can only say that when we finally got off the plane in Fort Myers and emerged into the well lit, immaculately clean spacious airport; and glided smoothly with no delays to our car in long term parking, leading to a relaxing 20 minute ride home on well paved 6 lane highways with no delays and plenty of ‘green’ and sunshine to view on the way, “Thank God we are home!”

Traveling is no adventure today, it is an unpleasant challenging gauntlet.  And for sure I will never choose to fly through Charlotte unless someone can sedate me and wake me up when I arrive somewhere else.