Summertime 2024 1 Start : A good airport can get you relaxing faster.

I want to first start off with hats off to good airports. You know, it must be a feather in the cap for an airport to become bigger and put in another runway, as per London Heathrow for instance. But I say, it makes them worse.  There are some airports I will not book to go through at all now.  London Heathrow is one of them.  Chicago O Hare is THE worst airport I will never go through again if I can help it.  However, Atlanta, which is a big airport hub, is ok and seems to be able to control its "bigness".  

But the airports that I now always try to book through are, in Europe, Amsterdam

Schipol and in the US, Detroit for the eastern US. All the airports I have mentioned I have used at least twice.  Hats off also to the Sarasota airport in Florida for being big, but still small to get around in.  Granted some years ago, they did cancel a flight because of a lightning storm, but this time they did not although I thought they might cancel because the heat was terribly excessive.  Even after a hurricane.  

The thing that makes a good airport is its ability to reduce stress in the travelling IN the airport. Two areas where stress can increase is waiting in lines and going from one gate to another in connecting flights.  Chicago fails utterly because its customs line and lines in general are out of control. You have no ability to know for sure if you will make your next flight.  You have to book with a three hour layover just to cover.  And the walking from different gates does not help either.  Though there are worse.  

Amsterdam airport is also a hub, but not huge.  I did have concerns both times this year with the stupidity of their customs officials.  One in which I was separated from my daughter -- "didnt you see the sign which read 'no one under 12 in this line?'" in fact I had not and I still did not at any time.  And when I showed my green card to the official, he had never seen one and had to ask his superior if such a thing existed.  Geez, where are we, North Korea where the customs have never heard of a country called "Ireland"?  

But this was more than made up by the superior boarding process now of KLM.  They used to have a long line because they had to question everyone, "who and when did you pack your bags, did you get any gifts from anyone...?"  Now they just take a photo of you upon boarding the airplane.  Zippo, poofo, much more efficient.   

Detroit was golden.  I got off the European plane and walked to customs on a Saturday late morning and there was no line to speak of at customs (all people have to go through customs and pick up their bags and check them through again on the first airport on entrance in the US).  Not only was there hardly any line to speak of, the customs people were nice and efficient and we got our bag with no problems.  The process was so quick that we were able to catch an earlier flight to our end destination and arrive at our destination with an extra 4 hours or more to take care of starting our vacation.  Wow, that never happened before.  Courtesy of a good system at Detroit.  

Since we got in so early we were able to take care of the things that needed to be set up to get ourselves "rooted" in our vacation.  Get the car, get some groceries, unpack, if I had been smarter we could have even gotten our library books right away.  And get the swimsuit out and get in the water right away on the first day in the afternoon.  

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  

I have written several times on the case of airports on my blog.  But again I will tie in this subject of airports with the blog subject of being a father.  My kids are teenagers now, and pretty good travellers (my daughter was running ahead of me this time to get to the connecting gate faster because we thought we had to rush), but when you are travelling with small children it is pretty important to know which airport is going to give you more stress as you travel with your family vs which is going to facilitate your travelling smoothly.  When you are responsible for keeping your kids with you and being prepared with their customs papers AND getting to your flight on time, you should know which airport will help and which will hinder.  Keep in mind there is usually a couple ways for you to get from point A to point C or D and by no means is it a matter of "well we had to connect through Chicago.  No no no.  Over the years I have amassed a little volume on the good, the ok and the downright stressful airports.  I have several posts in my blog on the airports, go back and read them if you care.  In general though, as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, it is the smaller airports which more often facilitate a smoother travel than the big ones.   

Enjoy the continuation of summer.  There is still enough of it.  Summer piece 2 coming later this week.