Wednesday

We made it back to Utah yesterday, with a travel time over 24 hours door to door. It was miserable!

I’ve always tried to avoid J.F.K. airport like the plaque, but this time we were forced by the price to go through there. I have nothing against New Yorkers and really love the city, but the airport is like being in a third world country. I could have very easily compared it too something out of Africa, but decided not to voice my opinion there. After all they held the power to send my luggage off to Somalia. It is only now with suitcase in hand that I can safely say they are extremely unorganized and chaotic.

Like all international airports in the States, you must first collect your baggage and take them through customs. Usually this is a fairly easy task, where you collect your bags from the caracal, load them up on a cart and push it all a few hundred feet past some sleeping custom officers. You then hand them over to the airline reps on the other side where they are scanned and sent on to the final destination. At O’Hair airport this runs very smoothly.

At JFK in the International arrival area; every language in the world can be heard. So why would they have carts there to help people move their luggage two hundred feet that cost five dollars? What kind of a foreigner carries five dollars worth of quarters in his pocket? The ATM machine is on the other side of customs.

We walked passed the bored agents with suitcases dragging behind and straight out the front door to the street. We missed the small sign and hallway to the left for connecting flights. So did most of the travelers. Finally after pushing our way through what seemed like a lift line in Italy, the two airline agents checked our luggage the rest of the way.

Terminal two was where our connecting flight left from in six hours. We thought it best to eat something in terminal three, the larger of the two, which had more to offer. When we arrived the line was out the door and had no idea what the line was for. So we reluctantly thought it best to find the connecting corridor to terminal two. I asked one of the employees. His brash response was “What do I look like Information?”

We were told by somebody else to walk down the road and a cross to the next building. That was the way to terminal two. Here we are coming in from Sweden, a simply transfer to our next flight and we are all huffing it outside along a busy airport road, something was wrong with the system?

The line was standing still at the next terminal through the security check. One very lethargic employee was dreaming of some other place, while slowly checking passports against boarding cards. A glacier would have been advancing faster. After three hours later we were standing in front of our next gate.

We all walked back over to terminal three through the corridor, that we never found before and sat down in a restaurant. Karin and I both ordered the largest beer they served. We had another three hours to kill.

At ten thirty at night we touched down in Salt Lake City, all very dead tired and longing for a flat bed with plenty of legroom.

Today I have been stapling the Amsterdam paintings on stretcher bars.

Richard Boyer