Travel with the Ullmanns! See the world! Listen up! This is how we began.

As planned, and with a friend’s kind help, we loaded the five pieces of luggage resulting from weeks of negotiation into a van and set off for Albany International and Paris. Summer clothing, winter clothing, two laptops, a suit and a coat in a garment bag, our pills, our snacks assured our survival for the next four months in the wilds of Europe.
Five hours later, in mid-afternoon, we had made it as far as the Wolf Road Best Western’s triteness.

USAirways was having a bad day. The sign showed 1:10 pm as the departure time for our flight and three hours later, after boarding, watching the engines revving up and down, deplaning and retrieving cabin luggage that did not fit the cabin of the Dash airplane, it was still flashing “on time”.

Meanwhile two more feeder flights to Boston and Buffalo had been scrapped. We were told that it must be the heat. US Airways does not do “hot”. Maybe it is considering moving to Canada.

The ladies at the podium demonstrated, in my opinion, the superiority of the female gender: unflappable, their fingers embroidered at lightning speed proposals of alternatives on the computer keyboard. Firmly but gently they steered us away, one after the other, from the impossibilities, to the probabilities and impassibly expected our decisions.

We decided on Best Western, for which we had negotiated a voucher from another very festive supervisor called April. Again her demeanor and competence, time after time, towards all comers, was admirable and enviable.

The next morning (now we are talking August 18th) we negotiated our expeditionary luggage back onto the somewhat ramshackle shuttle and to the terminal This time we were trying our luck with Continental flight 3202 to Newark, ETD 12:50 pm. The tension mounted when that time arrived and passed, and no plane materialized at the end of the ramp. Our connection was with a flight to Paris Charles de Gaulle at 6:10 pm….so there seemed to be no reason to fret.

But fret and sweat we did. The gentleman at the podium kept us informed of the fact that he had no information...two other flights to different locations came and went, while he assured us that the flying time to Newark was only 35 minutes….if only we had a plane.

We boarded at around 2:30pm, but by that time the company had missed its “wheels up” time with traffic control, so we sat at the end of the runway until we finally left around 5 pm. In Newark we deplaned at a quarter to six and galloped through what seemed miles of terminal (of course, most of the people movers were “being repaired”). Suffice to say that we made the connection with no minutes to spare .

In the 21st century there must be a better way. Where is Scottie when we need him to beam us up? It is clear that air travel has had its day, that the repeated declarations of chairmen of airlines of being focused on getting us to our destinations safely and quickly look good on the monitors but are totally removed from reality. Twenty six hours from Albany to Newark! In the most technologically advanced nation in the world! What a joke!