I feel like I’ve written about airports and traveling so many times that there’s nothing left to say. There’s two basic kinds of airport experiences- when you’re in a hurry and when you’re not. When you’re not in a hurry, airports are usually boring, vaguely unpleasant places with too many places to buy bad food and not enough chairs. When you’re running late, airports are exciting and magically grow larger at a rate inversely proportional to how much time you have to get to the gate. Of late, I seem to pick the time to arrive at the airport when nobody else is there. Today is December 23, one of the busiest travel days of the year, and we arrived at the airport to find exactly zero people on line at the curbside check-in. This, of course left us with well over an hour before our flight boards. We then strategically planned out time usage so that we could ultimately end up rushing to board at the last minute.

The big discovery I made this morning was that my USAirways credit card, for which I pay what I consider to be an exorbitant amount, qualifies me to not have to pay to check luggage. I did not know this. I typically either fly Southwest or do carry-on only, but traveling with 3 females makes this completely impractical. Let’s just say that there is no a direct correlation between the size of the person and the size of their bag. But the free baggage checking more than covers the cost of the credit card.

Next, of course, came the security thing. We stood in line, debating whether to get scanned or felt up. Since I get patted down every time I go to a ballgame (though exactly what they’re looking for and how they can tell if I have it by touching my pants for a second I’m not sure), I enthusiastically voted in favor of the feel.

I should note that I think this whole thing is stupid. They’re doing this stuff now because that was what the last would-be terrorist did. Hopefully, next time the perpetrators will hide stuff in their hair because I don’t have enough hair to make a scalp search necessary. For the moment, though, I’m willing to bet on their being only a tiny percentage of TSA folks who are doing the patdowns because they enjoy them. Plus, I don’t get the big deal. Is it degrading? I guess if it makes you feel degraded then it’s degrading, but I’m not convinced that there are many inherently degrading things, and this doesn’t strike me as one of them.

But ultimately, the only person called out was my 16 year-old daughter who was wearing one of those oversized sweatshirts that look cute on teenage girls and nobody else. Somebody called out “enhanced!” and they quickly penned her up between some of those fabric row dividers like they use to make you shuttle back and forth on line. A small woman came over and checked around the sweatshirt in a not sketchy way, joking with my completely unfazed daughter the whole time.

We then walked to the gate. I’m not wearing a pedometer, though I bet there’s an app on my phone for it, but it must have been a half mile from security to the gate. This was because USAirways makes you check in in one terminal, even if the flight’s gate is in another terminal. Plus, we were in the international terminal, where they have to space things out to make room for those passageways that make you feel like cattle when you arrive from a foreign destination.

We made the usual futile attempts to find decent food, only to discover that they were boarding the flight 15 minutes early. So of course we had to go rushing to the gate.

My favorite news story of the year is now the NY Jets foot fetish story, where the coach has these videos of his wife’s feet or something like that. To be honest, when this started, I thought they were still talking about the coach who tripped a player during a game because that was sort of about feet too. But now I see NY Post headlines like “Distressed Jets Coach Bares His Sole!” I don’t personally care about feet one way or another. As long as my own feet don’t hurt, that’s about all I think of them. On other people, I guess nice looking feet are nice, but not necessarily any more so than nice looking anything else. Others may feel differently.

Flight update: One of the bathrooms in the coach compartment is broken. Presuming the flight is full, this leaves one bathroom for 162 people on a 3 1/2 hour flight. Our seats are right next to the bathroom and I’m sitting on the aisle, so the area right in front of my seat is probably the most action-packed place on the plane. There’s been a line ranging from 2 to 6 people here for an hour and a half, including one guy who’s about 6’ 7” whose been here twice and seems to stay in there for a really long time. I wonder if it takes longer for him to pee because he’s further up.

In my capacity of logistics manager for our trips, it’s my job to worry about whether everything is going okay. Now that we’re on the plane, the worrying shifts to what the hotel will be like. If we were someplace larger, I’d be worried about getting to the hotel, but St. Thomas is small and we have rolling bags so I’m guessing we could walk to the hotel by nightfall if we had to. Really, what I’m waiting for is the reaction from my kids when they realize that the guest rooms don’t have wireless Internet.