6042 Miles In 24 Hours Works Out To Just Over 252 Miles An Hour
"Amazing" is one of those words — right up there with "unique" and probably more than a few others — that is constantly under threat by indiscriminate and imprecise overuse. That said, all of us thought that it was amazing that we even made it to the airport on the evening after that great day-after Christmas snowstorm hit the East Coast.
We left the apartment around 5:30 p.m. to make our scheduled 10:30 p.m. flight. I slipped on an icy glob the stairway leading down to the subway station by our apartment but was unhurt. The 7 train came as expected. The E train came as expected. So far, so good.
It was good that we left early because the JFK AirTrain at Jamaica station was not yet back in service. (The Port Authority should do something with their website, by the way.) These people were sitting around the station when we showed up around 6:30 p.m.:
The AirTrain employee announced to the crowd assembled that there were no trains and no shuttle buses but that there were taxis available down at the street level. For some reason few people were responding to this announcement, but we took it to heart:
We got a taxi pretty quickly. The cab driver wasn't using the meter, which he wasn't supposed to be doing, but seeing that the streets went mostly unplowed for most of the day and there weren't other transportation options, it wasn't really time to argue with a $10 per person charge (Jen would have killed me if I said anything). The driver provided a legitimate enough sounding sob story anyway — it cost him $120 to rent the cab and he was further in the hole after paying some guys $40 or more to dig out the street so he could drive away. Along the way we passed by abandoned cars on the ramp leading into the airport, some banged up. One of our fellow $10 fares was a high school kid from North Carolina, in town to visit NYU. He picked an unlucky time to visit. He told us that he decided that NYU probably wasn't for him.
We got to Terminal 4 just before 7 p.m. It was crowded with two days of backed-up international flights:
We settled into line just after 7:
Still in line at 7:30:
Toward the front of the line at 8:30:
It took another hour or so to wait to drop off our checked luggage at the big X-ray machines:
So remember before when I said that it was no time to argue with a taxi driver? When I wrote "seeing that the streets went mostly unplowed for most of the day and there weren't other transportation options, it wasn't really time to argue"? The point being that this unusual (but not unique) post-snow day called for calm and levelheadedness? That was before an entire family tried shaving off a good 30 or 45 minutes of X-ray machine waiting time by cutting in front of half the line. A family of EgyptAir passengers called them out on it.
"We're flying Royal Jordanian," one of the teenage (post-teenage? hard to tell from her Kardashianistic fashion sense . . .) daughters explained before adding with a sneer, "Not Egyptian Air." I eventually joined in the chorus and explained that many of us were also flying Royal Jordanian and that the X-ray machine line was for all the counters, not just the Royal Jordanian counters. (I couldn't help myself, this being the last time that I'd feel entitled to enforce whatever social contract we were operating under, at least for the duration of the trip.)
The father and mother pretended not to hear anyone. The EgyptAir passengers behind us continued to press the issue. The offending Royal Jordanian family refused to move, even after an airport security officer was called over.
"I don't want to have to fight you," the daughter finally said to the EgyptAir mother. "We're all eventually going to get inside."
The four of us talked about it for several hours afterward. How rude was that? How are these children raised? Who does that? It went on from there.
We finally made it past the X-ray line and into the secured area around 10 p.m., only to find various passengers camped out, some sleeping even, along the concourse. Our flight wasn't even on the board yet. We drank some beer. We finally got on the plane just after midnight:
Here's snow piled on the tarmac outside Terminal 4 as we were taxing down toward the runway, 2:25 a.m.:
So basically it took a while, but eventually we got out.
Already epic!
It doesn't take long to notice cultural differences between the U.S. and the Middle East. For example, the seatback touch screen features a Mecca compass as part of the rolling flight map display:
And if you tire of Arabic pop music or The Police's 1983 album Synchronicity, you can always listen to the Koran as you glide through the sky:
Or you could just watch Eat Pray Love:
And Samuel Huntington rolls in his grave:
At Amman they held our connecting flight to Cairo, and we finally landed after 10:30 p.m. local Cairo time — 3:30 p.m. New York time the following day, bringing the total journey time at that point to around 22 hours:
We got through the visa line and the immigration line, and waited at the baggage carousel and also for the ride to the hotel, eventually getting to the hotel sometime after midnight. We figured it was about 24 hours total. All of us were thankful to have arrive safely and very excited about the start of our relaxing Grand Egypt & Jordan Adventure!
See also the Big Map: Egypt/Jordan, December 27, 2010-January 11, 2011.
Posted: January 14th, 2011 | Author: Scott | Filed under: National Geographical | Tags: Cutting In Line, Flying Out In Bad Weather, Grand Egypt & Jordan Adventure, NYC Taxi, Poor Parenting, Rediscovering The 1983 Album Synchronicity, The Clash of Civilizations!, The Middle Eastern Reading Of The Meaning Of Eat Pray Love, The Port Authority's Crappy Website