Charles de Gaulle Airport was Designed with Extra Long Walkways to Cull the Weak and the Sick

And Other Travel Tips for Your Summer Adventures

Photo by Atoms on Unsplash

You can never get to the airport too early.     

I once got to an airport in Mexico so early that it had not yet opened. There was just a soldier with a machine gun standing outside the gate. Naturally, I made the cab driver wait. I had not gotten up at 3:30 in the morning to be abducted.

Sure, I have friends who believe I worry too much about missing my flight, but I also worry about birds being sucked into engines, failing to achieve liftoff at JFK and sliding off the runway into Jamaica Bay, and in-flight collisions. That’s the secret of being a successful traveler: Be open to all the exciting possibilities. And sneak vodka into your purse in a mouthwash bottle in case you hit turbulence.

Actually, to be perfectly honest, I pregame before a flight, taking a .5 milligram tablet of Klonopin an hour before departure and a swallow of vodka before take-off.  I call this cocktail the Ed Harris. (He made a big impression on me as the unflappable John Glenn in “The Right Stuff”.) It works great. Once, when my friend Herb and I were on vacation in Fiji, one of the engines of our little de Havilland Twin Otter failed after take-off and I was a model of composure. I also had more drugs in me than CVS.

If the only way you can fly Business is to change planes, especially at Edinburgh Airport, don’t do it.

Edinburgh Airport is the size of Cleveland and there is a security agent in his early 20s who will go through every item you’ve packed, focusing on your emergency medicine bag and the Herpes ointment.

He spent so much time examining it, I wondered if I should give him the back story: I got Herpes in the 70s, from a guitar-playing California shrink who would take me to a party and take another woman home. Obviously, I should have paid more attention when this guy said he’d had a sore on his penis, but the only sexual disease I knew of then was cystitis, which Greenwich Village women cured with cranberry juice and up to 36 hours of abstinence.

Anyway, eventually the agent tired of reading the big words on the Herpes prescription and impounded my half-empty eight-ounce tube of John Frieda Dream Curls conditioner. Why? Did someone tell him, in terrorist spotting school, that the bad guys were smuggling poisonous compounds onto planes in hair conditioner?  How would this work? Would you rush the pilot’s door, massage product into their scalp until they lost consciousness, and then crash the plane into the bonny town of Culross in Fife?

 “It’s not a liquid, it’s a cream,” I tell the agent, after he recites the holy no liquids over 3.2 ounces scripture.

 “It’s over three ounces,” the agent says.

Whether you are in the Sixth Arrondissement in Paris, which is where I was last week, or Bearsville, New York, there is a rule all Airbnb’s follow: You will not be able to figure out how everything works until the morning you leave and even then, a few things may elude you.

This is not coincidence, this is something Airbnb operators are contractually required to do. Then they watch you stumble around on secret cameras and laugh their heads off.

I shared my BnB in Paris with an old friend (platonic, there’s no need to give up dreaming, boys!) Paris was having an unseasonably cold spell and it took me three days to figure out how to turn on what appeared to be the radiator in my friend’s room, but I never figured out how to work mine.  There was no way to turn it on unless you were a superhero with mind control. Also, the shower head was two feet above my head so I couldn’t adjust the spray, although the water that trickled down the wall was always nice and hot.

This was still better than the Airbnb where my friend once stayed, in which you flushed the toilet by waving your hands over the tank. There was no instruction sheet about this, you had to figure it out yourself. I believe the Airbnb owner who came up with that one got an award.

Do not waste time in Paris on cultural events like the Léon Monet exhibition, which might be crowded, or the ballet at the Paris Opera House, which will require packing extra shoes and a nice outfit.

Pursue only those activities which will allow you to wear the same tights and top for six days. My favorite cultural event is a baguette slathered with butter and apricot jam, accompanied by two hours of conversations with old friends. I also recommend spending as much time as possible in the study of Berthillon ice cream.

There was a fraught moment, in the Luxembourg Gardens, I considered taking in a performance of the Théâter des Marionnettes. I had never seen a performance involving the legendary Guignol and thought it might be illuminating to see a puppet whacking someone on the head with a stick, especially as I live in New York.  But the weather had finally warmed up, so my friend and I found the section in the park you’re allowed to sit on the grass, another cultural activity I cannot recommend too highly.

Charles de Gaulle Airport was designed to cull the weak and the sick.

The world is dangerously overpopulated and in a bold attempt to address this, de Gaulle Airport was built with the longest walkways in the world, especially Terminal 2E. You walk a half mile to check your luggage, you walk another half mile so you can smile at the facial recognition camera and someone can paw through the contents of your bag (missed the vodka, fooled ya!); and you walk a mile to a train that will take you through Belgium to your departure gate. And if you collapse and die on the way, there’s more oxygen for the rest of us. Vive la France!

It was just after I’d gone through security and was hiking in the direction of the airport train that I experienced what I can only call a divine visitation: I saw, through a dreamlike haze, someone who resembled Lady Justice, blindfolded and holding two scales. One scale held the security gauntlet to which I had just been subjected, the other scale was piled high with baguettes.

Yes, in my darkest moment of exhaustion and despair, the very essence of travel conflict appeared to me: Baguettes versus airport screenings. I think the scale with the baguettes was heavier, but I was so close to collapse by then, I don’t honestly know.

Never switch airplane seats to accommodate a husband or wife. They’re married. If they miss each other so much, they can sit next to each other at home.

 After you have boarded a plane, a husband may ask you to change seats so he can sit with his wife. This will lead to a domino effect in which you will end up seated next to a coughing, sneezing woman in her 60s who works in finance and is carrying a mysterious virus you will not be able to shake for two weeks, but which three tests will rule out as COVID.

This illness may be avoided if you slap on your N95 medical mask, but if your mask is stashed in your luggage in the belly of the plane it will do no good at all. This is the kind of advice you get only from an experienced traveler such as myself, so I hope you are finally subscribing.

 A Global Entry card is an excellent way to avoid custom lines, but only if it has not expired.

In that case, however, it does give the Customs agent the satisfaction of sending you to the longest line at JFK. Then he calls up his cousin at Edinburgh Airport.  

“You know the one with the Dream Curls conditioner?” the guard says. “I told her there was an office right next to baggage claim she could get her Global Entry renewed. What I didn’t tell her was there were twenty people in there already. You should have seen her face when she walked in. I caught it on the security footage. I thought she’d have a nervous breakdown and they’d have to carry her off on a stretcher.  So, whaddya think of my idea about opening a BnB?”