The Romance of Air Travel

Panini Express - 1 star
Terminal 1, JFK

Growing up in a suburb of New York, Manhattan was the ultimate symbol of the urban adult world. And John F. Kennedy Airport, or JFK, as the most important airport of the world's most important city, was the symbol of air travel and all the romance it promised.

Today, New York area air travel is pretty evenly split between JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, and when I actually lived in New York as an adult I flew much more often out of LaGuardia, like most business people. But JFK is still the main international airport, its terminals surrounded by rows of 747s painted in the colors of every major airline in the world.

I rarely fly through JFK, because it's too far to drive (about 3-1/2 hours if traffic is OK) and it's too close to my home airport for a connection. My only other flight from JFK in the last seven years came in the summer of 2006, when I drove to Hartford, found out my flight to London was canceled, re-booked on Aer Lingus, and drove to JFK to catch my plane. But this time circumstances conspired to force me there. First, I decided to come home from Paris for the weekend - flight home on Friday, flight back on Monday night. Ordinarily I wouldn't voluntarily take two long flights in coach, one overnight, that I didn't need to, but I didn't want to spend two whole weeks away from my daughter. And second, this Thursday I have a meeting from 10 to 1 in Nanterre (outside Paris), but I need to be home on Friday, and the only flight back I could still catch on Thursday returns to JFK.

So I was driving through the tangle of highways that protect New York from outsiders, over the Whitestone Bridge with its far-off view of the Manhattan skyline. In my memory, when I cross this bridge I'm sitting in the passenger seat with my father driving, on one of my trips to Europe in the 1990s, on whatever airline had the cheapest fare at the time - Tower Air, Pakistan Air, whatever, all through JFK. Those trips always seemed like such an adventure. This time, since I left my suitcase with my clothes in my hotel in Paris, I was left wondering ... what exactly do I need to pack? The answer, since I had left my passport and my euros in my briefcase over the weekend, was ... nothing. Flying to Paris has never been so anticlimactic.

Air France is in the old Terminal 1, which is largely empty, with only a smattering of stores, a paucity of eating options, and almost no working power outlets - overall, a letdown compared to some of the gleaming commercial centers like the Munich or Amsterdam airports, or even compared to domestic hubs like the Northwest concourse in Detroit or the Delta concourse in Cincinnati. I ended up eating the vegetarian standard, a tomato-mozzarella-basil "panini" - a kind of sandwich I first ate in Paris at a place around the corner from the BN way back when. It was surprisingly good - decent fresh mozzarella, a bit of balsamic vinegar to give it flavor, and most importantly bread that was grilled to the point of being slightly blackened and crunchy on the outside. And with that I boarded the plane, settled in for a night of 3 hours of sleep, caught the RER from the airport to Paris, and showed up at the office at noon the next day.