By the Time I Get to Ghana
6/13-14/14 By the time I get to Ghana, I will have been in transit for 32 hours. Heeding the advice on the Portland International Airport website, we left the house at 4 a.m. "Arrive two and a half hours early for international flights," it said. I thought there'd be a heightened security experience, extra scrutiny of my documents, other things I couldn't imagine, since I haven't flown internationally since 1990. In fact, the only difference at check-in was that I had to present my passport instead of my driver's license. Then I got to kill two hours at the gate. By the time I finish this trip, I will have cooled my heels so much I'll need to defrost them. Five hours in Chicago, eight hours in London, plus those two in Portland, means almost half my travel time is being spent sitting in airports, waiting for flights. The people watching may partly make up for it: as I've been sitting here in Chicago, I've seen some frighteningly young ...