The Road Home from Atlanta

[canyonwalker]

Georgia Travelog #26
Back Home - Sunday, 13 Apr 2025, 5pm

Flying home today from Atlanta was not hard. I won't say it was easy, as flying across the country is seldom easy. And getting through ATL airport this morning was certainly not easy. In fact ATL has now earned a spot in my personal rankings as the slowest, most complex airport to navigate in the US. Yes, is beats out Newark, Denver, and even Washington Dulles for that dishonor. It took me over 40 minutes to get from the curb to my gate. I'm accustomed to running that gantlet in less than 15 at most airports. But other than it taking too long to navigate ATL things went smoothly today.

For one, not getting up absurdly early went smoothly. Yay, planning with a 10:45am departure instead of 6:45am. I've got to give partial credit to time zones, though. Flying west gives us 3 extra hours to work with in planning our trip. Plus, we stayed near the airport last night so it was just a 5 minute drive to return the car this morning.

Thanks also to planning and time zones working in our favor we landed at OAK airport around 3:30pm. Then getting our luggage and hailing a ride entailed less waiting time than usual. Perhaps the thing there is that day shifts are staffed well— unlike evening shifts when seemingly half as many people are working critical roles even though clusters of flights are still arriving. We walked through our front door just after 4:30pm.

Now it's 5, and I already have most of my luggage unpacked and things stowed away. Being home at this earlier hour— versus taking flights that'd put us home at 8, 9, or later— gives us plenty of time this evening to eat a normal dinner, catch up on tasks we didn't do while we were out for 9 days, and have the rest of this evening to unwind. Plus, I even got about 90 minutes of napping on our connecting flight from Chicago, so I'm not as fatigued as I otherwise might be from this long travel day. All the better to return to the daily grind of work tomorrow morning.

Comments

[some_other_dave]

If I recall correctly, ATL is the single busiest airport in the United States. So it's not unexpected that there are significant hassles associated with there.

Never flown there myself, and not planning to either.

[canyonwalker]

ATL is the busiest airport in the world as measured by passenger boarding but a huge bulk of that is connecting traffic. As an O&D (origination and departure) airport ATL ranks much lower. That's why I was surprised the part of the process from the curb through security took so long. That part doesn't handle connecting passengers. The train that connects between the terminal and the airport's SIX(!) concourses was actually pretty fast.