Hmmm ...
I was talking with a fellow traveler recently (or, as we say in the South, “the other dayâ€) when I mentioned an upcoming four-hour layover at ATL. “The sad thing about that,†he opined, “is that there’s no comfortable place to sit in the entire airport.â€
Lawd, y’all, the man is dead on. In fact, there is no comfortable place to sit at any big airport in the United States. Not for four hours, anyway.
Back in the old days when we could afford to ride the same airlines everywhere, I was a high muckety-muck Platinum or Gold and used to wait in the so-called executive suites. They didn’t have a comfortable place either. The bathrooms were closer and so were the sodas. But the places weren’t really comfortable.
ATL has one restaurant wherein it’s comfortable and enjoyable to sit and eat for a good while, but after that it’s fidget and squirm. The restaurant is Paschal’s, a downtown Atlanta legend since 1947, owned all that time by an African-American family named—what else—Paschal. They now have three locations at the airport. It’s a fine place to eat, even if you didn’t grow up on collards, candied yams, fried chicken, and peach cobbler, as we Southerners did.
In the old days, I took pride in being able to find a place to nap during a long layover. I was a master at it. I slept in construction areas, at unused gates, and in other dead areas of the airport. My favorite was a meeting room behind the Billy Mitchell area at MKE. Another airport had a hotel in which you could always find an empty meeting room.
I enjoyed a lot of great naptime in such areas, but that all stopped immediately after September 11, 2001. You could still find a few such places but were scared to use them lest you wake up surrounded by drawn guns.
I keep reading about airports with bunk rooms but have never seen one. If you have plenty of time, catch a ride over to the FBO and slip into the pilots’ lounge.
Anyway, I have two long waits this week. Wish me luck.
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