Hi, friends!
I hope the weekend is going well.
Do you have any do not recommend points you want to share with the group?
I had layovers in Salt Lake City airport this week and yes, it’s a very clean airport. However, both times I saw several barefoot toddlers running around with their families in the airport. I would not do that. I don’t care how clean the floor seems to be.
Also, do not recommend the shopping in the SLC airport. Several stores were very prairie chic design which I don’t like anyways, and had names like “Hip & Humble” which ewwww. Add to the fact that I’m neither hip nor humble.
I flew out of Dulles Airport once and that was awful. Remote, getting to gates was awkward, crummy food service, and despite the striking architecture it seemed just dreary.
Die Hard 2 was stupid — planes don’t circle runways until they run out of fuel and crash — but the dumbest thing was the idea that planes would do that for the sake of landing at Dulles.
You know that at the first sign of trouble pilots would be looking for an excuse to go somewhere, anywhere else. “Well, folks, the sky looks juuuust a little bit overcast and it might snow a liiiitle pinch at Dulles, so as a precaution we’re off to Richmond. Or maybe Philadelphia. Trust me, you’re better off anywhere than Dulles.”
I’ve flown into Dulles and that’s precisely why I much prefer (Reagan, although I don’t think anyone really calls it that) National. So convenient on its little island in the Potomac, so smushed together. One time I landed kind of late at Dulles and the flight I was on was pretty empty, and I walked miles and miles alone along these empty corridors until finally I kind of just bumped into the friend who was meeting me. It was very odd for a major gateway to a large modern country’s capital.
For whatever reason, airport designers seem to either understand or completely miss how much travellers want compact airports. Amenities are fine, but don’t make people walk 20 miles from one gate to the next.
This article gets kind of lost in brandspeak, but I think it touches on some decent points about why airports stink so often. Nobody is really in charge of how passengers move through the place.
https://archive.curbed.com/2016/6/10/11904834/airport-design-travel-airline-tsa
The 20 minute walk from the end of terminal B to the end of terminal A at SLC with a 102 fever was absolutely not enjoyable yesterday.
My most miserable airport experiences had to do with connections:
Connecting between international and domestic terminals at LAX, where you have to get your luggage through customs, schlep them from one terminal to the other one, re-check everything, etc.
Connection through YYZ during a ground crews strike.
Sprinting from A to E terminals at PHI because an airline decided to reroute my flights with a 20-minute window to change planes.
Falling over and cramping up running between gates Calgary.
Same here. Got sick from drinking bad milk at LAX when meeting relatives at LAX. My dad was pissed because he didn’t like his cousin (half cousin) and didn’t really want to talk to him so getting his son sick was the icing on the shit cake.
Had to run like hell in DFW (monorail or not) to get to my connecting flight.
Same with Denver.
Both times I made it with less than five minutes to go which meant I had to put my carryon bag with the crew’s luggage as all the overhead compartments were stuffed.
Narita in the mid 80s was terrible. Not many amenities. Only a plinko arcade. I was soooooooooo fucking bored that I finished reading Battlefield Earf.
Dulles isn’t that shitty. Pago Pago airport is a sweltering shithole of biblical portions. When I worked for an airline, our first flight to Tonga hit a donkey on the runway, still a better experience than the finest day at Pago Pago airport.
Fair enough.
I once flew on Turkish Airlines and everyone cheered when we landed safely. If I knew the language, I would have like to have known why.
I landed at Papeete & our plane filled with smoke right after touchdown, they opened the doors & smoke billowed out as we taxi’d down the runway. Our air con had burned up. Still, better than Pago Pago!
That poor donkey
Hey, speaking of airports and things to be recommended or not, I’m going to L.A. in a bit more than a month and thinking of taking the FlyAway bus from LAX to Union Station, and the J line (“Silver Line”) bus from there to my hotel downtown. Has anybody got experience taking one or both of those (particularly in the opposite direction, as my flight back is due to leave at the nigh-ungodly hour of 7:30 on Sunday morning)?
I don’t recommend Texas. Or Mississippi. Or Tennessee. Or Arkansas. Or any state that is being run by a bunch of right wing psychopaths.
But often there’s a few delightful blue cities in those shithole states!
So if you do end up in them, just stay out of rural areas.
when visiting…..dont bother with amsterdam…i know thats where you land….but unless you have a museum you want to see…its not worth the effort and everything costs twice as much as in the rest of the country
just take a train to scheveningen from the airport….its a nice place just outside of the hague
its a short trip….and you’d get to stay at the bad hotel
which is just hilarious……also im pretty sure that picture was taken from my aunts porch…
Doesn’t bad just mean “bath” in Dutch, though? So, like . . . even in spite of everything else, isn’t all they’re saying is just that you get your own bathroom when you stay there. . . ?
you are correct….however i will never be able to get past my english dads absolute hysterics whenever he saw the place
tho..tbh…its probably not so much about bathrooms as that its spitting distance away from the beach
badplaats being a seaside resort