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Report 1000: Hallo Brrrlin: A long, snowy weekend in the reborn German capital

By Russell Wayne from Weston, CT, Winter 2006

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Page 1 of 6: March 10: The Joy of departure from JFK Airport

While people in the New York area were enjoying the record-breaking warmth of mid-March, we struggled to work our way down from Southern Connecticut to JFK airport. It was 75 degrees and traffic on the roads resembled the Saturday morning, summer rush to the beaches. Cleverly, we thought, we had taken the long way on Cross Island Parkway from the Throgs Neck Bridge to avoid the inevitable clogging at the point where the Van Wyck Parkway meets the Jackie Robinson Parkway. The Cross Island, it turned out, desperately needed angioplasty.

We left Connecticut at 2:15 p.m., figuring to arrive at Avistar long-term parking by 3:45 p.m., which we calculated would get us to the Delta terminal just about two hours before flight time. Wrong! After breaking all records for blood pressure, we pulled into Avistar at 4:15 expecting to hop on the shuttle and get to Delta a few minutes later. In keeping with all the delays we had already experienced however, Avistar had also made a few changes, not the least of which was the new one-at-a-time gate to allow their system to perform its own security check on our car. That seemed to take forever and probably wasted another seven to eight minutes.

Once the gate was raised, we pulled up to the left, only to have an attendant wave us back, indicating that we needed to pull over the right lane. We did so as the blue shuttle bus pulled up behind us. With no room to maneuver further, we opened the trunk and pulled out our luggage, intending to save a few minutes and get aboard that shuttle without wasting even more time. The shuttle driver was not pleased, though he had no room to move anywhere. Meanwhile, the sole attendant kept motioning us to leave the luggage in the trunk. We ignored him and dropped the luggage right next to the other nearby luggage. Ever so slowly, the attendant ticketed the car in front, temporarily disappeared and then returned to give us our ticket. Somehow, we managed to get our bags aboard the shuttle and find the last two seats. It was 4:35. All we had to worry about now was checking in before they closed the flight.

Unsure of which terminal we would be going to, we told the driver we needed Delta International, figuring that most outgoing international flights would be leaving from new Terminal 4. Fortunately, that was a mistaken assumption. All Delta flights continue to leave from the Delta terminal, which in its earlier incarnation had served Pan Am. Indeed, the shuttle's first stop was at Delta and as we walked forward we were relieved to see a sign saying Delta International. We grabbed our stuff and managed to complete the check-in formalities barely 10 minutes before an overly important gentleman announced that "due to regulations" no further passengers would be allowed to check in for the Berlin flight. We boarded half an hour later and assumed the near-fetal position as our plane worked its way across the pond.

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