I’m sitting here in the gate area of the Fort Lauderdale airport, waiting for a flight back to Nashville (via Atlanta). We returned yesterday from a 9 night cruise (which I’ll post about later). It only took about 5 or 10 minutes to get through the security check point, which was better than when we left Nashville a 11 days ago.<\/p>\n
On the cruise ship, they had stations and crew members just about everywhere you looked dispensing hand sanitizer. I guess that’s to help prevent any illnesses. Sitting here in the airport, there’s a lady sitting to my right hacking her head off with a bad sounding cough. It strikes me that since it’s no longer practical to bring your own hand sanitizer to the airport, they should have those same stations here that the cruise ship has. At least that way you’d be able to sanitize your hands after going through security and whatever.<\/p>\n
The flight we’re on is overbooked. In the next gate they’re asking for volunteers to take a later flight in exchange for a travel voucher. If we were taking a non-stop flight, that might be an option for us, but we’re connecting in Atlanta and that’s not an option for us. Now there’s a flight that’s overweight due to a large number of bags that have been checked, and they’re calling for one or two folks from that flight to take a later one in exchange for $400 in “Delta Dollars”.\u00a0 Sorry, but if you want to inconvenience me that way, it’s gonna take cash, not credit towards a future flight.<\/p>\n
We’ve been here at the gate now for an hour; our flight is scheduled to leave in another hour. It should start boarding in about 30 minutes. I’m surprised at how busy the airport is this early (7 am EDT). The Nashville Airport was busy early too.<\/p>\n
The big bottleneck is, of course, going through security. For the 10 or so gates that were accessed through the checkpoing we went through, there were about 5 or 6 x-ray machines. The bottleneck getting off the ship was going through customs; for the 2500 passengers getting off the ship, customs had 5 customs agents.\u00a0 The phrase “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” comes to mind.<\/p>\n
Enough rambling; the laptop battery’s getting low and I need to secure it before boarding. Later this week I’ll be posting my thoughts on the cruise and traveling in Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m sitting here in the gate area of the Fort Lauderdale airport, waiting for a flight back to Nashville (via Atlanta). We returned yesterday from a 9 night cruise (which I’ll post about later). It only took about 5 or 10 minutes to get through the security check point, which was better than when we … <\/p>\n