Today I am going to try a personal experiment of sorts.
Normally when I fly back to Columbus I fly from Bangor International Airport and connect in Philadelphia, or LaGuardia, or Reagan National for the second-leg flight to Columbus. But the last few times I’ve done that, my flight out of Bangor has been delayed and my connecting flight has been blown. As a result, I’ve had to spend hours in airport concourses, waiting for another flight back to Columbus. Normally, this wouldn’t be too bad, but the current masking requirement means you spend 9, 10, or 11 hours straight in a mask, breathing your own exhaust and trying to resist the constant urge to scratch your nose, and that pushes the experience into the “to be avoided at all costs” zone.
So I did some research, and found that there is one direct flight from the Portland, Maine International Jetport to Columbus. I’m on it today, It will require a long drive–a bit over three hours, total–because Portland is well to the south, and there are no short drives when you are talking about the shoreline-hugging roads of coastal Maine. But I like driving, when I’m in my car I can listen to music in a blessedly mask-free environment, and if Mother Nature and air traffic controllers and aircraft maintenance technicians and all of the other things that might delay a flight cooperate, I’ll minimize the masked time and probably spend about the same amount of time in transit as I would doing the two-hop trip from Bangor.
I respect the governmental air travel masking requirement and will faithfully comply with it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it, or that it isn’t worth seeing whether there are viable options to avoid it. Today will test the direct versus indirect hypothesis, and the limits of my mask-avoidance options.
Webner House 