LH Franz Travel day.
During the pandemic, as 2020 and 2021 went by, I became aware of another way to reduce the inconveniences of what used to be called the “romance of air travel.”
Besides TSA PreCheck status, there’s an outfit called CLEAR, providing a service that shortens the time you spend on security lines at airports and some sports stadiums. It has a hefty membership fee, and the first time you use it at the airport, you must show the representative a government-issued ID and let them register your fingerprints and an iris scan into their system. After that, when checking in to airport security, instead of going to the TSA security lines, you go to a CLEAR kiosk. Once they confirm your identity using your biometrics, a CLEAR employee escorts you to the front of the security line. I imagined getting dirty looks and glares from other passengers waiting on line as I strolled by. Nothing like that happened. The whole operation is done very discretely. As I said, CLEAR is not cheap, but my United Airlines loyalty credit card provided a deep discount for a year’s membership.
CLEAR got me to the security gate quickly and with no drama. Unlike last time, all the conveniences of TSA PreCheck were in effect so there was no need to unpack and repack stuff. Once through the full body scanner, I was free to wander the departure corridor at leisure. My airline affiliated credit card provided me access to the airline lounge. There I could get snacks and drinks, and work on my iPad without scrunching my body into a waiting area chair, balancing it on my knees to type, and trying to find an outlet to charge my phone. Although the lounge was fairly filled up, charging outlets were plentiful, tables tops were abundant, and the snacks were tasty.
All in all, my airport experience this time was uneventful and devoid of glitches and irritations.
Most flights going across the Atlantic from the U.S. East coast are “red eye” flights, leaving in the evening and flying overnight, landing in the morning at their destination. Ideally, you will have slept overnight on the plane. I have met only one person who was able to do this, and only because he took a sedative pill prescribed for his insomnia. The rest of us are doomed to the “red eye” experience, along with the problem of jet lag caused by the rapid shift in time zones.
I had gotten up that morning at 6:00 am. By the time we boarded, it had already been a very long day. On the plane,Galaxy Quest got me to somewhere over the Atlantic. Jurassic Park got me a little further. At that point, I was actually tired enough to nod off for an hour or two until breakfast was served on the plane.
After landing and going through customs, I was ready to spend my first day on Icelandic soil. With only a couple of hours sleep behind me, I was not entirely sure what shape I would be in by the 3:00 pm check in time. But that was something to worry about later. My first order of business was to find Betsy.
This turned out to be a little more complicated than it was three years earlier at Charles DeGaulle airport. She describes it better then I could:
It’s one thing to create a map of an airport, with locations of the terminals, and the shops. But until a traveler arrives at the airport, they won’t know which terminals they will pass through when they arrive, and when. Before or after customs? Before or after security? As an exercise, you can go to the airport map on the KEF Airport website and figure out where you think mom and I should have planned to meet after we made it through customs.
Here’s what happened: I got off the plane in KEF Airport, got my bag, went through customs, and passed through a swanky new airport with lots of shops, restaurants, and lounge areas. I walked past all of that, because I had arranged to meet mom at “Joe & the Juice” in the ground transportation section of the airport, where the only shops were “Joe & the Juice” and “10-11,” the Icelandic equivalent of the 7/11 chain of stores in the U.S. Once you were in this area, you couldn’t get back to the nice swanky area. It was here I waited for mom’s flight to get in, watching people rent cars, flipping through magazines, and asking the English-speaking Icelandic vendors if they understood some of my hard-learned Icelandic phrases
On our previous trip to Paris, we had arranged to meet at a “Brioche Dorée” by the baggage claim, and miraculously, we did. It turns out there are multiple Brioche Dorées at CDG Airport. Without the ability to send and receive calls we could easily have missed each other. This time, sitting in KEF Airport, I got a text from mom. She announced she had arrived at Joe & the Juice. I looked around. No mom. After a few texts back and forth, we realized she had gone to a different Joe & the Juice, the one in the nice area past airport security. A few more texts redirected her to mine.
Our trip by Flybus from the airport to Reykjavik proper gave us our first look of the Icelandic countryside. Seated with a bus full of other tourists, we could only imagine we were all having the same conversation about the Icelandic landscape. How alien it looked. How little green there was. How very flat and rocky. It perfectly illustrated that the island had been created through volcanic eruptions.
This bus took us to the BSI central bus terminal. From there, passengers were to find smaller sprinter vans that spread out across the city to drop passengers off near their lodging. Each passenger got a color coded card to match up with a bus – green, red, yellow. The sprinter vans were not there when we arrived. So we stood, a clump of milling tourists holding colored pieces of paper, looking up like meerkats whenever a new bus arrived, swarming the bus driver to see if this was theirs.
Ours eventually came and dropped us at Bus Stop #14.
