i told my mother about the woes of flying right now. she knows. i told her that someone specifically dissed newark that she’s flying out of.
she drives down to florida with her posse every year, but since she’s old now that’s really draining sitting in a car for that many hours. so she’s going to try giving up her 50 year vow never to fly again. i think it was turbulence that resulted in said vow, not flight delays. i told her that even a flight to florida which isn’t that far is likely to have turbulence, so be ready for it.
her international flight 50 years ago had a flight attendant gasp at the turbulence and that freaked her out. i’ve never had a flight attendant gasp at turbulence.
If you travel very often, an airline credit card may be worth it. I have the United card for $95/year. For that I get priority boarding (group 2), two free checked bags, and two passes to the United lounge each year. You have to use the credit card when you book to get the perks, and it’s the only time I use the card.
The lounge access has been helpful for delayed flights, it’s much more peaceful to sit in a plush chair in a quiet part of the airport with snacks vs hanging out with the riff-raff in the terminal.
I also have the Chase Sapphire Reserve, which has a lot of travel perks but it’s $550/year. They do give you a $300 travel credit, so as long as you spend $300/year on travel the net cost is $250. They also pay the cost for TSA Pre, a Priority Pass (lounge access) membership, and you get DashPass for DoorDash. Priority Pass has scored me a LOT of free or nearly free meals.
Isn’t the area immediately around EWR kind of nasty?
Folks with money can insulate themselves by going to decent airport-area hotels; and savvy travelers can figure out options to nicer places further away. But for amateur or budget travelers, unfamiliar with the area…?
Same, although the key metric for me is “total time in transit”. A nonstop flight will make more sense to me than driving around the 6-hour-drive mark. I’ll only do connecting flights to destinations that are more than 8-9 hours’ drive away.
One nice thing I’ve discovered about Google’s flight search tool is that it’s easy to include multiple origin and destination points when searching for a flight. In August, I’ll need to go from Hartford to Toronto for a meeting. It turns out that the least-expensive and fastest way to make that trip will be to drive up to Boston and catch a Porter flight into the downtown airport in Toronto. (From Hartford, I could only get to Pearson, and I’d either have to risk a connection, or spend an extra night to catch an Air Canada puddle jumper the next morning.)
The streetcar? I thought it basically didn’t go anywhere. And it competes with street traffic which is asinine in a downtown area. Doubly so in a city that already has subway tunnels dug.
The newer rail system that I’ll applaud is Seattle. And not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m pretty good friends with someone who was on some advisory committee for that project. He came down to visit me and check out Portland’s Max & streetcar.
And he got an earful from me about everything that was wrong with Portland’s. My two biggest gripes were that it competes with traffic in the heart of downtown and there are way too freaking many stops downtown making it way too slow.
And I gotta say… Seattle’s does not have either of those problems. From what I can tell Seattle really did theirs right.
You’re the one bitching that this woman is shitting on your city and those that live there. She isn’t shitting on your city or you because your travel experience at these airports is completely different. She is specifically talking about people who are traveling through one of the airports as an intermediate stop.
Of course, Seattle had an actual traffic problem they were trying to solve whereas Cincinnati did not. So I’m sure Seattle was willing to spend a crap-ton more than Cincinnati to get something that actually works rather than something that merely looks cool, which seems to be all Cincinnati cared about.
Huh, I have not found it useful in getting places when I visit, which being my hometown, is often.
It doesn’t go near the art museum, Playhouse in the Park, the ballet, the zoo, the aquarium or any of Newport on the Landing, the hospitals, the museum center, either of the universities, the observatory, to say nothing of stuff that’s outside of downtown like the airport or Hyde Park or even Clifton or Mt Adams.
It’s a hike to get to the Taft Museum or Montgomery Inn Boathouse, but you can do it. Still, the likelihood that I’m going between two points actually on the streetcar is just so incredibly low that I consider it useless. I guess if you want to park once to go to the bars / restaurants in OTR and then go down to one of the stadiums or Bicentennial Commons it’s ok, but meh.
Despite the crappy streetcar, it’s actually a really nice city. Great waterfront, sports teams with great stadiums, top tier symphony orchestra, good museums (oh I will grant you that the Freedom Center is on the streetcar, and the casino), nice restaurants, one of the best zoos in the country, and a pretty good amusement park.
So while I will grant you that it is not up there with London and Paris and Rome in terms of people’s dream vacation destinations, it actually is a nice place to visit.
Of course I’m primarily visiting people when I go.
Brilliant move to fly into Toronto’s Island Airport rather than to Pearson. In addition to avoiding Pearson chaos, the Island Airport has short security and checkin lines because it is so small and it is only a 5 minute ride to TO downtown business core.
