I don’t know who decided to put JFK at the south eastern end of Long Island, but he surely doesn’t have many friends in those who have had to brave the impossible traffic of the Grand Central and Van Wyk Expressway to get there.
Our American Airlines flight was scheduled to depart at 5:45 so I figured, what the hey, leave in plenty time…say 2:30 and don’t sweat it. Great plans of mice and men, or something like that. Our limo was late; only twenty minutes, but that put us dangerously close to the magic 3:00 window for making it through the mid-town tunnel. I debated telling the driver to hit the FDR and the Tri-Borough Bridge (now the RFK), but I figured he’s the pro. We lost another twenty minutes or so fighting the traffic between 39th and 36th at the entrance to the tunnel, but we made it through without a traffic calamity.
The Grand Central was slow but moving until the split for the Van Wyk. We were now stop and start, with more stop than start. I asked the none to friendly driver casually, “shouldn’t JFK be about fifteen minutes beyond LaGuardia?” He laughed, or more like snorted. “Hah”, he said. “Not at this time of day”. “Well then”, I timidly replied, “how long do you think”. He snarled over his shoulder as Sandra was elbowing me in the ribs, “if I was a fortune teller, I wouldn’t be schleping people like you to JFK in rush hour traffic”. I wisely nodded in agreement and let the subject drop. The trouble was, however, that I’d carefully calculated the complicated calculus of my liquid intake and interval limits between potty visits. Those male readers of you well into their sixth decade know whereof I speak. I will only say that we were reaching my interval limit faster than we were reaching JFK. A small panic started to creep up my….well let’s just say I was starting to feel some pressure in my nether regions.
Suddenly on the verge of full fledged panic, the traffic started to untangle. We made our way around a clunker stalled in the left lane and into the sunshine of full speed ahead. In ten minutes were were in front of the terminal, piles of luggage at our feet. We organized ourselves for a dash to the nearest relief station, but S. was dragging me down. I left her and the luggage with a puzzled information desk clerk and set a new sprint record for a man with two knee replacements and full bladder. At last….. Ahhhh. All ended well.
All of this wouldn’t have happened if the Queens County supervisors hadn’t decided to exercise eminent domain in 1943 over a patch of land nineteen miles from NYC that was then occupied by a politically impoverished golf course named Idlewald Golf Club, and proceeded to build what was supposed to be a relief airport for the overflow from LaGuardia. As you early travelers will know, Idlewald Airport (IDL) was JFK before it was JFK and right after it was Major General Alexander E. Anderson Airport, and New York International Airport. Suffice it to say that it’s now the busiest international gateway in the US as well as the largest volume air cargo terminal and almost as hard to get to as Narita in Tokyo.
It’s also at least an hour and a half from mid-town New York in rush hour traffic, and if you can’t make it that long, there’s a Chevron station with an almost clean restroom in Astoria. Stop there.
PS. We had a good flight to Paris.
