Airmail

Today was a day of travel. Travel and airports and hotels seem to lose their sheen at excitement when you're traveling for business and you're all alone and you don't really want to go.

To get from where I live to Bar Harbor, Maine, one has to take three separate flights. The first flight was only 20 minutes long and involved a brief adventure on a small propeller plane all to the tune of a very cute four year old boy with the whiniest voice I've ever heard and unending questions ("But, whh-hy is the bus turning, Daddy?)

After a quick lunch and some time wasting in Philadelphia, it was on to a reasonably large plane to fly to Boston. This one was actually big enough to have a first class.

My punishment for this luxury was the third plane. If someone attached wings and a propeller to a Dodge Caravan, it would probably be bigger than this plane. And to boost our confidence in this alleged aircraft, we were provided with a pilot and co-pilot that may not have been old enough to drive cars. The Junior Airmen then informed us that there was a thunderstorm sitting over our destination. In case we weren't nervous enough about flying in a toy plane with toy pilots.

It was only fitting that the toy plane would land at a toy airport. I've seen some pretty small airports before, but the one in Bar Harbor makes the airport on Wings look like O'Hare. The minivan with wings makes a constant circuit to and from Boston and this is the only flight you can take unless you own a plane. The "terminal" is the size of my living room and the people who have been "screened" by the two TSA agents (required by law) are kept in a glass-walled dog crate. The current homeland security alert level is posted on a nicely laminated sign taped to the wall.