Welcome to Stapleton International Airport

[mishalak]

...passenger zones are for loading and unloading only. No parking at any time. Unattended vehicles will be ticketed and towed away." The rich melodic voice which I was told was someone famous from years gone by at the local Channel 2 repeated the message over and over on a loop every few minutes. I remember listening to the announcement while waiting as a few flakes straggled out of the cold grey skies. I remember the middle aged pines growing in the gap between the departures viaduct and the parking structure and the grimy almost New York feel of the space. Especially in winter. I don't know why this memory came to me today, but I remember it strongly. I wonder if someday I might be one of the few who can remember what it sounded like there outside Stapleton's main terminal or what it was like inside the buildings accreted one on top of another from the earliest days of air travel through the jet age and onto the end when airplanes became dreadful packed flying buses. All the little details like the brushed steel doors of elevators with exuberant stylized maps of the world upon them to the old single engine airplane that hung in an atrium.

I don't suppose I'll ever fly again without pressing need for speed. In a way things have come full circle to when flying was a privilege that I was lucky to sneak in upon through family connections to the industry and suit. Only now I am kept away by a dreadful crush and unreliability that does not fit with the way I want to go on holiday. I would rather find a way for more days off and travel by car than to try squeezing out more time through 'just in time' air travel with an industry that is about as reliable as Amtrak.