Category: default || By jt3y

TAMPA, Fla., June 5 --- I am not what you call an experienced traveler, especially when it comes to flying, and that's mainly because I throw nickels around like manhole covers. I rather enjoy traveling, actually, but airplane tickets cost money, and so do motel rooms. That means that when I go somewhere, I drive (or even better, get someone else to drive), and when I stay, it's strictly Motel 6 and Econo Lodge for me.

But I need to do some interviews for the G.C. Murphy book, and some people whom I very much want to talk to are in Florida. That's a little bit long to drive, even for my sleek, gray Mercury. And since the trip is being (generously) paid for by a grant, I don't feel right dinging the grantees for the price of an Amtrak roomette. That leaves me flying the money-losing skies.

You may recall that the Tube City Almanac, about two years ago, told U.S. Airways to go pound sand and leave the Pittsburgh International Airport. Surely, I said, other airlines would fill the empty gates. Well, they have, and one of the newcomers is something called Independence Air. I decided to take a little bit of my own advice (which serves me right, many people would say) and book my flight with them. They used to be a charter carrier called Atlantic Coast Airways, and they used to also fly as a feeder service for the big trunk lines. When the airlines decided to launch their own low-cost regional carriers, Atlantic Coast decided to strike out on its own, too.

I've got to interview seven people in three days, spread out from the Gulf Coast of Florida (Naples, Bradenton) to the Atlantic Coast (Delray Beach and Hobe Sound). I've also got to stop in two small towns near Lake Okeechobee. So, I've decided to fly into Tampa, rent a car, drive from interview to interview, and wind up my trip three days later in Palm Beach, where I'll fly back to Pittsburgh.

The first leg of the trip on Independence Air takes me from Pittsburgh to Dulles, where Independence has its hub. And here's where my lack of airline experience bites me in the rear end, hard. I made sure that all of my junk fit into two carry-on bags, and that the bags were under the maximum carry-on size. I made sure nothing sharp or even vaguely threatening was packed. I packed my hand-held amateur radio, but I disconnected the battery (to make sure it wouldn't transmit while in flight, which is a major FCC and FAA no-no) and put my amateur license in the bag with it. And as I approached the X-ray machine at Greater Pitt (sorry, I can't break that habit), I unzipped both bags before putting them onto the belt. Then I put my sportcoat into a bin and put it on the belt.

"This bag has a laptop in it," I told one of the TSA screeners. They nodded.

I walked through the metal director just as the woman running the fluoroscope began yelling at me. "SIR! DOES THIS BAG HAVE A LAPTOP IN IT?" she shouted.

"Yes, that's what I told ..."

"SECURITY! I need a pat-down on this man!" she said.

And thus I found myself in the little glass cube, taking off my belt, taking off my shoes, emptying my wallet. At least they didn't come at me with the gloves and the K-Y Jelly, and to the credit of the guy doing the pat-down, he was very apologetic. But would it have killed the first screener to say, "Sir, you need to take the laptop out of the bag?" Or for Nurse Ratched to just say, "Hey, dummy, take this laptop out of this bag and go through again?" No, we had to go through the whole rigamarole. Maybe they have a quota to meet.

As I was going through the pat-down, Nurse Ratched came over to yell at me: "Where's your boarding pass? You need to have your boarding pass!"

"It's in my sportcoat," I said. "Inside coat pocket."

"You're supposed to have it with you at all times, sir! There are signs posted, sir!"

"But you told me to take it off and put it through ... " I started to say. It didn't matter. She was gone, presumably, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, to take a bunch of 8-by-10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.

Duly chastised, and deemed a threat to no one but myself, I was set free. I resolved to strip naked at the Palm Beach airport for the return flight. It might be the first time in history that they need the barf bags at the terminal and not in the planes.

Pittsburgh International, by the way, now has an attractive display in the airside terminal depicting the history of commercial aviation in Allegheny County, including many nice photos of Allegheny County Airport and old Greater Pitt. It made me more than a little upset all over again that the county demolished the old terminal rather than seriously trying to repurpose it.

It also made me nostalgic for the days when people used to dress up in good clothes and get into a luxurious TWA Super Constellation or United "Mainliner" DC-6. They strolled into the terminal --- no security checks necessary --- and across the tarmac, and then stepped into the airplane, where lovely stewardesses brought them pillows, hot coffee and tea, and magazines to read.

Granted, airliners in the 1940s also had the unfortunate tendency to plow into the sides of mountains, and tickets were considerably more expensive (relatively speaking) than they are today, but you take the good with the bad.

In any event, Independence Air turned out to be a pleasant experience. The flight to Dulles was in a brand new regional jet, and Dulles to Tampa was in a lovely new Airbus 317 with leather seats. The airplane safety lecture on the smaller jet was delivered (via tape, of course) by Allison Janney from "The West Wing." I suppose that's because we were flying to Washington, D.C. If we had been flying to Chicago, maybe we would have gotten Noah Wyle, and if it had been L.A., I don't know, Erik Estrada. They even gave us hot towels. If I have one complaint, it was that those leather seats were finished in a shade of electric blue never before seen in nature. Gelett Burgess never saw a purple cow, and I'll hazard that there are no bright blue ones, either.

On the flight down, I read Joel Achenbach's column in the Washington Post, and was relieved (after all, misery loves company) to find that he shared my feelings: "The security checkpoint is a bottleneck in a transportation system that is supposed to be as fluid as possible. Most people at airports are business travelers, and business travel is, at least in theory, all about efficiency. In the ideal world, you have the conversion of a solid (the businessperson) into something that can be transported through the arteries of the American marketplace. The model for this is canned cat food, which, according to my friend Mit, takes advantage of the great innovation known as pumpable meat. The industry figured out how to render meat into a fluid and pump it into the cans, which are then sealed and cooked. That's what you're supposed to be when you travel in America: Pumpable, squirtable human meat, transferred from one container to another.'"

The worst part is that I don't feel particularly any safer from terrorist attacks, and I some how doubt that if (when?) we're attacked again, that terrorists are going to skyjack airplanes. For all I know, they'll use golf carts.

Achenbach calls us "sheep" for putting up with this stuff at the airports of a supposedly free country. To which I say only, "Ba-a-a-a-h."

At Tampa, I picked up a copy of the Tribune. The big story on the "Region" page was about Weeki Wachee Springs. Apparently, the Southwest Florida Water Management District is trying to shut down the tourist attraction in an attempt to force the resort's owners to comply with new regulations. Weeki Wachee, for those of you who don't know, is a place where young women in mermaid outfits swim around for the amusement of yokels.

You might think that Weeki Wachee belongs on a planet of its own, and you'd be close enough; it turns out that it has its own municipal government, and a total population of 9 full-time residents.

And you thought Western Pennsylvania had some small towns. At least in our tiny little in-bred municipalities, the people keep their clothes on. (Although, like the Weeki Wachee mermaids, some of the locals do have webbed feet.)

Then I went downstairs to the Avis desk to pick up my car. I'd asked for a Chevrolet Monte Carlo --- I didn't want to be too ostentatious, but I also have to spend several hundred miles behind the wheel, so I didn't want some tiny little torture chamber. "We upgrade you for free to Buick Park Avenue, OK?" said the clerk.

"Well, not really," I said, "I asked for a Monte Carlo." Cripes, I thought, isn't it bad enough that I have a Mercury Grand Marquis at home? If I get a Buick Park Avenue in Florida, I might as well get the white belt and shoes to match, too. At least with a Monte Carlo, I'd get to act out my Dale Earnhardt Jr. fantasies. (Appropriate in Florida, no?)

"Si," he said. "Let me see if one is available." There was, he happily informed me. It turned out to be in arrest-me-red.

"Well, how am I going to be able to speed in a bright red car?" I asked him. He blanched.

"Sir, please, you no speed in this car ... ?"

"I'm just teasing," I interrupted, and he smiled, a little weakly, before handing over the keys.

The Monte had the two features I most wanted in Florida --- a radio and air-conditioning --- so I sat inside, fired up the ignition, and turned both on. My past experience with rental cars led me to believe that the radio would be tuned, loudly, to either a hip-hop station or a classic rock station, and I wasn't disappointed --- it was the latter.

Luckily, in preparation for spending 10 or 20 hours in the car in Florida, I had brought 10 CDs of old-time radio shows in MP3 format, along with the CD player and a cassette tape adapter. In fact, I had been patting myself on the back for the past several days for being so smart.

Until I noticed that the Monte didn't have a cassette player. It had a CD player.

Which wouldn't play MP3s.

Pride goeth, etc.

I was scheduled to meet some friends in Venice for dinner that night. On the way there, I punched through the radio dial. It seemed that I had my choice of classic rock, the drone of NPR, Spanish salsa music and about five different fundamentalist Christian stations.

Finally, I pulled off of the Interstate and stopped at a Walgreen's to buy one of those little plug-in dinguses that broadcasts your CD or MP3 player over your FM radio. Sure enough, they had one (made in China, natch).

Lucky me, they also had a sale on batteries. In fact, they were featuring a whole string of items because of a very festive upcoming occasion: "Stock up now for Hurricane Season!" said the signs.

It seems the state of Florida suspends sales taxes on emergency items for the first two weeks of June. And just as some places have President's Day sales, and other places have Back to School sales --- well they have hurricane sales in Florida. You got a problem with that?

As it would later turn out, Walgreen's and the other stores --- Advance Auto Parts, for instance, was advertising portable generators and flashlights --- had excellent timing. Florida's first major tropical storm of the year hit a few days later. You've got to know the territory.