I don’t understand Bradley International Airport.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention: I took a few days to pop back to Connecticut to visit my sister for her 40th birthday. Total surprise visit: only my brother-in-law knew about it. At least in CT… a whole lotta people in WA knew about it. Anyway, I figured that I would surprise my sister with a birthday visit – I didn’t think I’d be able to do enough psychological damage remotely and at her age she might forget who I am by the next trip back. Some things need to be done in person.

And that brings me to the BDL airport. When I fly between WA and CT, I have a couple of options. I can fly into New York – be it JFK or LGA – or I can fly into Hartford. Actually, BDL is about 15 miles north of Hartford, which only adds to my travel time, when heading to southern CT, but it’s not too bad. True, I’m spoiled by my less-than-30-minutes to Sea-Tac, but what can you do? Oh. I also have the option of Newark and Logan airports. One is in a city that once had an entire city block for sale. The entire block. At what looked like “fire sale” prices. Who does that? The other airport is about three hours from where I need to go and I’d have to traverse the Big Dig to get there. Um, no. Besides, you’d know that I’d have to pick out Red Sox fans from the grill, by the time I got to CT – too messy.

BDL has changed over the years. It was built a long while ago, true, but it’s been a relatively popular airport for a while now. The fact that it was one of the only airport in the NY/NJ/CT area that could emergency land a Concorde helped. Guess when you’re only plowing under tobacco fields for an airport, you have room for long, long runways.

So why the Jekyll and Hyde comment and why would I want to hide? Over the last four or five years they build up the airport. New parking garage – which isn’t that expensive for short trips – and a newly revamped terminal with a good chunk of shops. All sorts of stuff. Terminal A is no SEA concourse or JFK mall or a LAS mini casino, but it’s nice enough for a business-oriented airport.

Problem is, I’m in Terminal B.

Terminal B is what was the original airport. WiFi hotspot? Ha! Oh, it finds a network, but you can’t connect to it. You can’t even pay to get access on it. Not even an email kiosk. This alone would irk the shit outta me – even my parents have WiFi. Even if they don’t know they do. Shhhh.

But wait – there’s more! American flies out of Terminal B. Only American flies out of Terminal B. Every other airline has relocated to the new Terminal or left Bradley altogether (or has since gone out of business). I almost exclusively fly American, so this directly impacts me: I have no other option than get stuck in this broken down Terminal.

Broken down? Yeah, it is, by any standard.

There’s one bowling alley style eating place. And I don’t mean one of those new posh techno-lanes places that are common in many cities these days. I mean the retro you-drive-a-car-with-faux-wood-panelling, “No Platform Shoes On The Lanes”, Disco-Fever 1974 bowling alley style places. Complete with walnut-laminate chipped to the particle board cabinets and rolling hot dog thingy. There’s also a news stand with a few magazines and $2.50 Diet Coke prices. I would swear that’s a higher price than what I’ve paid at stadiums for soda.

They even have analog flight info signs at the gate. Honest. They slide out the numbers for new flights and times.

The bathrooms were very… nostalgic. How often do you get to visit shitter that smells like a high school bathroom?

Even my carry on bag caused a stir at security – I don’t think they’d seen an iPod or PSP or DS lite before. I almost expected a Flintstones style bird to come out and perform the check, rather than using X-ray.

Look at that… there’s a fly on my book that keeps swirling around me.

Maybe I’m just cranky because I’m facing a four hour layover in Texas [at least they have a Chili’s and T-Mobile WiFi there]. I mean, there were plenty of other things that happened over the weekend that were blog-worthy. Or as blog-worthy as you can expect to get for this blog. But still: how they can have one extremely modern Terminal and one from out of an Airport ’77 movie, and expect to generate business, I’ll never know.

I think I’ll fly into JFK next time.