Mon, 7 March 2016, 5:40 pm: A two week trip to Europe doesn’t last two weeks for me. It lasts from the idea through the months of planning, into the trip itself and then continuing for however many months (sometimes years) I type up the resulting notes, post and re-post the photos, and tell and re-tell the stories.
As you might correspondingly infer, my photo-taking doesn’t begin with whatever the first official sight in Europe is. It begins with the luggage as I’m packing, the friends curbside at the airport as they drop me off, or the plane on the tarmac that is about to have the dubious honor of carrying my American frame across the ocean.
One of my absolute best pieces of travel advice is to always arrive at the airport at least an hour earlier than you think you need to. Standard wisdom in my adulthood has always been to get there two hours in advance of takeoff time for international flights. A few years ago I backed that up to three hours. I still always feel like I could’ve used an extra few minutes.
I snapped the above and below photos as soon as I arrived at gate 81 at Orlando International Airport. You can see it’s 5:40 pm. My departure was at 8:00 pm. Too much boring time to sit around before you sit on a plane for eight hours, some of you are thinking.
But know this: I’d already cleared passport control and security, which often takes substantially longer than it took me on this occasion. I hadn’t stopped for a meal or a drink; many of you will want to relax with a beer or a full dinner at an airport restaurant before you fly (overseas nighttime flights always serve you a meal or two included with your price, but it can take hours after takeoff to get fed). Traffic on Interstate 4 was not bad. (In other words, only one session of bumper to bumper crawling and only two wrecks on my side of the freeway.) You may value some time to make calls from the gate area, to tie up loose ends at home (“hey, Ed, can you let yourself in and make sure I turned the oven off?”) or the office (let your corporate credit card company know you’ll be charging things from abroad) or to touch base with loved ones (“miss you already, Mom”). Most critically, airlines begin the boarding process early these days— sometimes a full hour before takeoff. For transatlantic flights, if you’re not at the correct gate at least thirty minutes before departure, you might not be departing at all.
Hey, look, it’s 41 degrees right now in London. Glad you packed those gloves and fleece shirts now, aren’t ya? Before you power off your smartphone, download an app to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, because this right here is the last time for two weeks you’ll see a temperature readout that means a darn thing to you. Trust.
There’s “Ruby Tuesday.” She was already parked at my gate before I showed up. Virgin names all its aircraft. Maybe there’s an ABBA soundtrack aboard “Dancing Queen,” but then again I never heard the Rolling Stones on this flight.
If you want to pull a Matt and take photos of your plane and at your gate, do it quickly and while nobody’s looking. Not that any staffer would begrudge you your visual souvenir, but nowadays anybody lingering too long with a camera looks suspicious. For all they know, you’re building a blueprint of the airport or documenting how many crew members work near the planes or what safety procedures are. Definitely do not whip out your camera or phone in any security queue or in the passport/customs areas. They might confiscate it or make you late for your flight. If they decide they don’t like you, REALLY late.
I stood and joined the masses boarding this plane at 7:21 pm.