When the journey is half the journey

Tonight I find myself in Cincinnati of all places. Why I would intentionally find myself in Cincinnati on a Saturday night is a mystery to me, and why anyone at all would be here is a complete mystery to me. Getting here is its own sort of odd experience. Not the the flight is weird in any way. The airplane goes up and down, like airplanes tend to do. It's just the Cincinnati airport is a little odd.

Setting aside that the Cincinnati airport is not in the same state as Cincinnati and is actually called the Northern Kentucky Regional Airport the design of the place is unusual and perhaps cruel. I've not studied airport design, and can't really tell you what happened, but let me describe what happens after landing.

We arrive a some gate at the end of the A concourse, walked with the help of some moving sidewalks (Hey people, they call them moving walkways, not moving standways) toward baggage claim. This goes on for about a quarter of a mile, or 4 sets of moving walkways. Then, following the signs toward baggage claim and ground transportation (which is, of course, only called that at an airport) you go down a long escalator that takes you to a place where you can either take a train or walk to baggage claim, ground transportation having been left out of the mix until this point.

Normally I'll take a train anywhere, but this one didn't seem to say where it way going, so my love of trains was soundly defeated by my general insistence that I know where I might be going before I go there. So we walked down an equally long corridor, hoping it would lead is to ground transportation (there was no visible sign, though we later saw one behind a post. At the end of this corridor we left the security area, and I remarked to the TSA guy there about what a trek it had been and he responded simply, "It's a nightmare."

Not that any of it is specifically bad. There's just a whole lot more of its space than is needed and the distances are ridiculous. Once we got to the end of that long corridor we saw another, smaller one that once again said Ground Transportation. So off we went down another long corridor, at which point we finally saw windows and signs pointing to rental car buses. We stepped outside into, we'll, nothingness. You could see there were roads and airline terminals, but there was really no visual stimuli. And not even any rental car buses. Finally our bus came and whisked us off to the rental car station. And off we went to the actual state to which we heading.