In the US

Have returned back home, safe and sound, after an uneventful and pretty smooth trip. I left my lodging in Tirana at the ungodly hour of 2:30AM, after a full last week of work and being a guest at  a celebration for US Independence Day, organized by the US Embassy, the night before departure.

The new terminals built in Europe to handle more traffic at connection points are huge, enormously long, and, not very user friendly to older passengers. The one I just came through in Vienna that covers almost 40 gates, has only a couple of places where one could relax and get refreshments, thus requiring a lot of walking back and forth during long layovers.   Along the way there are a few machines that could dispense beverages and snacks, but those would require appropriate change in euro currency to operate.  Additionally, the entry level to the planes  are located at a lower level reachable by moving escalators, again not easily manageable by families with babies, and carriages, or elderly people with luggage. Assistance is provided upon request, but one must be bold enough to ask. 

The new Boeing 777 air crafts are equipped with the latest technology for video entertainment (by touch), because there is no more room for the old setup that used to have the remote control on the arm rest. The seats are much narrower than in the older crafts. Their width barely covers one’s back leaving the shoulders to overhang outside of it, thus requiring continuous repositioning by the passenger to avoid overlapping with the neighboring traveler.  Similarly there are problems with narrower passageways on board, which cause being continuously bumped into if one has an aisle seat. 

These are some of the adverse aspects of today’s travel, in addition to the delays that affect mostly, in my experience, journeying from the US outwards, rather than vice versa. Arrivals at NY JFK are usually on time, but at departures one must exercise patience and endure additional sitting time before lift off since planes are usually lined up on the tarmac for a quite a while waiting for the go ahead to leave the ground.