After a grueling eight-hour SAS flight from Oslo to JFK, our plane sat on the tarmac for 55 minutes before we were allowed to park at a gate…thank you so much!
And yet no more passport lines. You stand before a camera and they identify you solely by facial features. Roughly a kin of the digital procedure that 2001’s Dr. Heywood Floyd submitted to when he arrived at the orbiting space wheel.
After waiting way too long for my suitcase and finally reporting it missing via an online system (remember those lost-and-found offices of yore, conveniently located not far from the carousels?…gone), HE’s dark-gray, hard-plastic Samsonite finally turned up…the last lonely bag on the carousel, nearly an hour after we first entered the baggage claim area.
For years my bag had an identifying bright blue tag for instant recognition, but the animals who work in baggage handling in Oslo or JFK stole it.
Plus it was sprinkling outside with big puddles everywhere, and the temps were flat-out chilly. Oslo was at least 10 degrees warmer when I left — high 60s or thereabouts, zero wind. When I finally arrived at Jett’s home in West Orange it was moist scarf weather, technically 57 but more like the high 40s.
Thank you, northeast tristate corridor for transforming traditionally warmish May weather into a miserable mid-March atmosphere.
Put simply, it felt like brutal treatment and was therefore depressing as hell to be back here. I’ve felt this way each and every time I’ve returned from Europe. Fun’s over, fella. Back to grim reality…the enveloping gray salt mines of the soul. I was so happy over there. Oslo and Cannes are great towns, quality of life-wise. Oslo is expensive, true, but everything is spotless and gleaming and super-efficient, and the natives are so friendly and obliging
West Orange upside: The trees are fully in bloom, and the luminous green of it all is lovely.