Alaska Trip, Day 7: The End
The first thing you notice about the airport at Anchorage is the taxidermy: stuffed elk heads with glass eyes peer down from the walls; stuffed wolves with bared fangs guard the bottom of escalators; giant stuffed polar bears in glass enclosures rear up on their hindlegs, brandishing three-inch claws. Alaskans clearly love the natural world, but they love killing it and stuffing it even more.
The other thing you notice is the genial informality of the place. Most of my experience with airports has been around Washington, and while National and Dulles and BWI are reasonably well-run places, they’re mired in a stifling, prickly atmosphere of uptightness and suspicion. You feel it at the gates, certainly, where you’re generally greeted with a toxic combination of officiousness, distrust and contempt — but there’s a sort of pervasive feeling of unease, permeating everything.
Not so at Anchorage Airport. It’s relaxed and pleasant, and the TSA folks at the gate were friendly and helpful. They actually took the time to explain the crazy things they forced us to do. Of course, the explanations didn’t make much sense, but that’s not their fault. It was a nice, refreshing change, coming out on the other end of security without feeling violated and vaguely guilty.
Also awesome: the airport has free wifi, so I spent a bunch of our four hours in the terminal logged into work, slogging through the shitpile of email that had accumulated in my absence, pulling down the latest code, starting a build, wincing at my bug count, and just generally beginning the unpleasant task of slipping back into the real world.
It was fun being away.
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