America. Love it or leave it.

(Remember that expression from the 60s?) I love America. I truly do. And I have just left it. And as is always true when I leave, I am struck by how different things are in other places. I am tempted to say how better things are, but I recognize I am seeing the new place through inexperienced, innocent eyes. Once I am more familiar with a new place, I see its moles and warts, just as I see ours. I adore Paris for instance, but would I want to live there? No, absolutely not.

Still, the comparisons are arresting sometimes.

Consider: I arrived at Kennedy airport yesterday at approximately 2:20 for a 4:25 flight. Ransom and I caught the tail end of a thunderstorm on the way to the airport and it was a doozy. Traffic, already slowed by construction, nearly stopped. I have never driven through so much water on the roadway. I wondered if the storm would delay the flight.

Seemed like it wouldn’t. At first. We boarded promptly – and then sat on the plane for two hours, finally pushing back a full 90 minutes past the scheduled time. And the problem? The lightning associated with the thunderstorm had shut down fuel delivery to the planes at the gates. And, we were told, though this makes no sense to me, baggage was also not being loaded because the fuel hadn’t been. (Huh?)

Now this is perfectly logical – well, the fuel part at least – and is no one’s fault; I don’t expect the ground crew to load jet fuel and dodge lightning strikes at the same time. But I have to ask: why load us on to a plane that you know is not going to fly anytime soon? We were comfortable in the gate lounge; lots of folks had their electronics plugged in; there were coffee shops open; the air conditioning was working well. Why did we have to give all that up to sit on a stuffy, crowded plane for two hours?

Compare that to my experience at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. I – of course – missed my connecting flight to Glasgow, so I used their handy Transfer Kiosk to see what I needed to do. I was directed to a service counter where, after a wait of maybe three minutes, a very friendly, very efficient worker booked me on a flight leaving in two hours, gave me my boarding pass and then handed me two vouchers: one for five free minutes of phone calls, should I need to alert someone of the delay (I did not) AND a 5 Euro voucher for food at any of the restaurant shops.

How civilized it that? How different from the American experience!