You know. W. C. Fields’ supposed tombstone: Better here than Philadelphia. Or the old one: Last night I spent a week in Philadelphia.

Well, let me tell you about the last day of our trip.

First, do you know how to say “coincidence” in Portuguese? Our day started with one. Lorenzo was our Uber driver for the second time in two days. This morning he brought us to the airport in Lisbon, which was filled with an unbelievable number of people. Waiting and shopping. Shopping and waiting. If you ask me how many people were at the airport, I would guess (without purposeful exaggeration) that it was a little over half of the world’s population.

We had a cart for our luggage (Joan figured out how to get it) and were given priority treatment at American check-in because Edie was using a cane, so we were in decent shape walking through all the many shopping centers the Lisbon airport sends you through. We (read Edie) even bought two kinds of chocolate sardines. We got to the gate, boarded our flight, and for the next seven hours, until we landed in Philadelphia right on time, all was right with the world.

But then ….

Let me explain. First, none of us knew the Philadelphia airport, where we were to transfer to a plane to DC with time to spare (so we thought). So we were surprised when these things happened:

1. There was no line at the first men’s restroom you reach after you get off the plane and walk the corridor towards customs. On the other hand, there must have been a 20 person line at the women’s room. Nowhere in Lisbon or at Heathrow did we see evidence of obviously insufficient facilities for women. And those airports are enormously larger than Philly’s. But in Philadelphia……
2. After a very long time at the rest room (some inside, me outside the door), we went into a large room where a touted new self-operated passport review system was being employed. No people, just machines. You walk up to a machine, choose a language and are first asked a bunch of questions about what you are bringing into the country (any live cows or pigs?), and then are asked to insert the main page of passport onto a shiny block and (providing you line it up perfectly) the machine takes a photo of your passport. Then it instructs you to look at a spot a little higher on the machine and it takes your picture. Then I guess it decides if you are you and it spits out a boarding pass sized piece of paper that has your picture on it and a bunch of words. Because no one is expert on this machine, and many people have problems (especially putting their passport at the right place) there is an employee there to help you navigate this new experience. By the way, I think there were 35 machines and only one or two employees, so at times they must have their hands full. And, by the way, even if you know what you are doing, the machine takes longer than an in-person customs officer would.
3. When the machine spits out your picture, you assume that you have passed the test and been allowed into the country, but no. You step beyond the machines and you see an old fashioned bank of customs officials and you stand in line and wait until you have been called, just like the old days. Then the customs official looks at you, your passport, and the paper that the machine has spit out and says “okay”. Now, tell me what role he plays? Is he making sure the machine that replaced him is doing the job as well as he would have?
4. Next you pass through the large room behind the customs official to a door that leads you to the baggage area, but before you go to the baggage area, you pass another official who takes the picture that the machine has spit out, looks again at you and the picture, and nods at you to get out of here and leave him alone, for God’s sake. At least that was the look he gave me.
5. The next big room is the baggage retrieval room. This works like any other, I guess. You find the right carousel, you retrieve you luggage, and move on to the next activity.
6. Once you have your luggage (which you have to pick up in Philadelphia even though you had checked it in Lisbon through to DC), you have to take it out of the baggage area and then either go your merry way, or re-check for your connecting flight. If you have a connecting flight, you stand in another line and simply give it to an agent when you reach the head of the line. The agent looks at the luggage tag and your boarding pass, takes your bag and puts it on a conveyor belt. He doesn’t even bother to thanks you; instead, he grunts.
7. I should add here that we arrived at Philadelphia in Terminal A. Before we landed in Philadelphia, we checked the screen at our seat on our transatlantic flight, and saw that the DC plane would leave from Gate B4. Once you get to Philadelphia, as opposed to any other airport I have ever been to, you can’t find a board listing arrivals or departures. We saw none when we left the plane, none in the passport rooms and none in the baggage claim. We just had to hope that we were still B4. There did not appear to be anyone to ask. I did ask someone with a TSA uniform on, and he just shrugged.
8. But we figured that our next task was to get to the B terminal from the A Terminal. Again, nothing was obvious. We asked someone in an airport uniform who told us that Terminal B was a 2 minute walk, there was no train, and that the shuttle bus may not come for another 20 minutes. So we started following arrows – typical, of course, hallways, escalators and doors. And when we exited one of the doors, we found ourselves outside.
9. Outside!! Like we had just arrived from the Main Line. Each terminal is a separate building, apparently not connected to each other internally. And, for us at least, the walk was closer to 10 or 12 minutes, not 2 minutes. At least it was sunny and not too warm. What do people do in February? Seriously.
10. And, although we had boarding passes, so we didn’t have to check in, we then took a walk, an escalator ride, and another walk to the TSA security check-in which, as a matter of fact, was very, very crowded (maybe the longest line we had seen anywhere on the trip, other than in the Lisbon airport on check in). As we thought our flight was leaving in 30 minutes, once again we thought we might miss it. Luckily, again, an agent told us old folks with a cane that we could skip the line and move right into x-ray land. Even once our carry-on and other belongings were on the belt, the process took some time.
11. Once we got through security , gate B4 was right on the other side of one more shopping mart they forced us to walk through. And, we had more than thirty minutes until take off – because (a) we had misread the “boarding time” for the “flight time”, and – of course – because the incoming plane was late.
12. So we got back into DC about 20 minutes late (not a problem) and everything at National worked just like it was supposed to.

But I must say that – although nothing was lost, we didn’t miss our plane, and there were no tragedies, the multi-stage process Philadelphia required us to go through was totally unnecessary and ridiculous. To make up for it (not really), they upgraded Edie and me to first class. Yes, what a treat! First class on an American Eagle flight that lasts less than an hour! What a treat.