Early morning at the airport

It’s been almost six months since the last time I was at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. I’m here just before 5 am for a 7 am flight to Philadelphia. I’m on the way to what was supposed to be a guys weekend in Las Vegas. Due to the current sanitary situation, having one guy fly east made more sense than having three guys fly west. The trip will take about the same amount of time for me, except that I’m now going by air rather than by land.

The nice thing about being here so early in the morning is that the security line was negligible. In fact, I hadn’t even finished getting my identification out of my wallet when I got to the front of the line. Everything moved so quickly that I forgot to remove the liquids from my carry-on. TSA either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

The sucky thing about being here so early in the morning is that hardly anything is open. Even the coffee stand doesn’t open until 5:30 am. And forget about a beer. I remembered to bring an empty water bottle this time, which I filled at one of the free filling stations. At least I won’t die of thirst.

One of the things I do to pass the time at airports — other than writing blog posts — is to scan the crowd for familiar faces. I’ve seen people I know more often than you’d think, and I don’t really know a lot of people. However, when everyone is covered from the bridge of the nose to the tip of the chin, it means that every face is familiar, and also that no face is familiar.