Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport

More airport freebies – for people & pets – for Thanksgiving travel

Air Travel, Entertainment, Events, Free Stuff, Fun Stuff, Kids, Parking, Pets, , , , , , ,

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It may be stressful traveling this week through the nation’s airports, but there are some freebies and special events being rolled out that you may find useful and entertaining.

In addition to the events we listed yesterday at Boston’s Logan International Airport and Detroit Metropolitan Airport, you’ll find:

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Two days of free valet parking at Kansas City International Airport (MCI). To get a coupon for the free parking, fill out this form.

MSP Spoonfuls of Stories

Through Wednesday, November 25, 2009, you can stop by any Travelers Assistance Info Booth at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) and pick up a free children’s book, courtesy of Cheerios and The Spoonful of Stories program. The books include: “Junkyard Fort”, by Jon Scieszka, “Tea for Ruby”, by The Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, “Sleepyhead”, by Karma Wilson, “Ballyhoo Bay”, by Judy Sierra, and “What’s Under the Bed?”, by Joe Fenton.

ATL DOG PARK

And don’t forget that many airports around the country have opened on-site dog relief parks.  The latest to open is at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), which now has a dog park with two sculptures by Doug Makemson of Commerce, GA, who says:

“The model for “Abby” was my beloved yellow lab, Abby, who was always willing to strike a pose. She had a full life and a mercifully rapid demise a few weeks after the sculpture was completed. She was the world’s best dog; I miss her. The sculpture is made mostly from parts of a backhoe and a bulldozer, and the stone is Gneiss, a type of granite, from an old quarry near Glade, Georgia. For me, “Abby” the sculpture will always make me remember Abby the dog, the most loyal friend I ever had.

You can see the sculptures – and a happy dog in the park – in this cute one minute video ATL airport posted to celebrate the opening of the dog park.

Happy Thanksgiving – more airport freebies tomorrow!

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Free Wi-Fi at Cleveland Airport and new napping suites at Atlanta Airport

Air Travel, Hotels, Jet Lag, Openings, Wi-Fi, , , , ,

Cleveland Rocks!

Kudos to the Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport  (CLE) and the non-profit group OneCommunity for working together to bring permanent free Wi-Fi to the airport.

Cleveland Airport joins many other smart airports that offer travelers free Wi-Fi year round.  And, lest you forget, from now through January 15, 2010, Google is covering the Wi-Fi fees at a 47 airports, from Seattle to Miami.  Here’s a full list of the participating airports . Let’s hope those airports continue offering the service for free after that.

Nap Time at ATL

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You can now make a reservation at the first Minute Suites, at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). These “suites”, located inside the terminal on the B Concourse have daybeds, pillows and blankets, sound masking systems, and a “napware” audio program.  Each suite also has a a TV, desk, phone, and a computer.   How much will you pay to snooze in a “suite”?  The minimum reservation accepted is 1 hour and costs $30. After that it’s $7.50 each 15 minutes.

If you try this out, please let us know what you think!

Atlanta Airport goes green for America Recycles Day

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Airports all over the country have on-site recycling programs.

My home airport, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA), in fact, just won an award for the recycling efforts of the airport’s concessions, which recycle, re-use and compost everything from cardboard to coffee grounds and donate enough food to area food banks to feed more than 8,000 families a year.

AMERICA RECYCLE DAY LOGO

Now, just in time for America Recycles Day this Sunday, November 15th, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) is rolling out a new recycling program that will be effortless to use and will reduce the amount of trash the airport sends to landfills by 50 percent by the end of the program’s first year — and by 70 percent by the end of the second year.

ATL- Recycling

How does it work?  Simple:  Just put your recyclable materials and anything else you have to throw away in one of the containers marked with a GreenSortATL logo. They’ll do the rest: under the new program, all waste generated by passengers, employees and businesses goes into the same container and is taken to a facility, where it is sorted and recycled.

Great idea!

Great spots for plane-spotting

Air Travel, Observation Decks, Planespotting, , , , ,

I recently put together a USATODAY.com column highlighting some of the observation decks at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP), Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport (BWI), and other North American airports.

Minneapolis - Observation deck - wide

Today I’ve got a column about plane-spotting sites outside airport terminals.

The sites listed range from Millbrae, California’s Bayfront Park, which offers great views of take-offs and landings at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), to Gravelly Point near Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport (DCA), and a few unusual but, we’re assured, legal spots nearby Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL).

For a photo-gallery and a list of other highly-recommended plane-spotting sites  around the country, please see the full column on USATODAY.com.

RDU Observ Park - courtesy RDU Airport

(Raleigh-Durham International Airport’s Observation Park)

And of course, please share your favorite plane-spotting sites.

Airports with great artwork

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On the road but no time to visit the art museum? Don’t fret: along with fine dining, boutique shopping and full-service spas, top-notch art collections are now permanent amenities at many airport terminals.

For a slide-show on MSN.com, I pulled together examples of some of the fun stuff you’ll find in 15 airports in North America.

You can see the full slide show by visiting the story on MSN.com Travel: Airports with the Best Artwork,  but here’s a preview:

DFW STANDING OVATION

Artwork, some of it Texas-sized, by more than 30 local, national and internationally known artists dots DFW: Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport Terminal D and the Skylink train stations. Look down to see elaborate medallions in the terrazzo floors, look up to see giant murals and mobiles and look straight ahead to see unusual sculptures such as Anitra Blayton’s 16-foot tall “Standing Ovation,” (above) made from the casts of hundreds of pairs of hands.

At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) the flying corncob on Concourse E is Craig Nutt’s work: “Corncorde,”

ATL Corncorde

And at Sacramento International Airport (SMF) the big attraction is the supersized “Samson,” a sculpture in the Terminal A baggage-claim area made of two 23-foot tall towers of stacked luggage made of 1,400 pieces of cast-offs donated by area residents.

Sacramento - SamsonTo see more fun airport art, see the full-length slide show on MSN.com travel: Airport with the Best Artwork.

If I missed some great airport that you especially like, please let me know!

Next time you’re stuck at the airport, don’t get bored: get vaccinated.

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FLU POSTER SPITTING

The vaccine for the H1N1 vaccine isn’t available quite yet, but there are plenty of regular, seasonal flu shots around. And this year there are also plenty of airports where you can get a flu shot on the fly.  I tracked down the details for my At the Airport column on USAToday.com: Airports ready for passengers seeking flu shots.

FLU CARTOON

Last year travelers could get flu shots at about two dozen airports, including San Francisco International Airport, Des Moines International Airport, Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, Denver International Airport, and others. This year, with so many people concerned about getting sick, more airports are making room for flu shot kiosks.

And because of the heightened awareness, several airport clinics, including the UIC Medical Center at O’Hare, Orlando International Airport’s Solantic clinic, and the AeroClinic at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, began offering flu shots to the public back around Labor Day, even though the official flu season doesn’t usually begin until October. And airports such as Tampa International, which in the past offered flu shot clinics for employees only, arranged to have flu shot kiosks available for the traveling public.

FLU SHOT POSTER 1960s

Over the next few weeks, flu shot programs will be rolling out at Louisville International Airport, Sacramento International Airport, Philadelphia International Airport and others. Harmony Pharmacy will offer flu shots at its year-round clinics and from temporary kiosks at New York JFK and Newark-Liberty airports.

A spokesperson from Airport MD said that company hopes to offer flu shots by October 1st in Miami, Las Vegas and Minneapolis-St. Paul airports. Several other airports, including San Diego International Airport and Oakland International Airport, are still working out their flu shot program details. And Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, which for the past three years has been able to offer flu shots for free during a few days towards the end of the season, expects that this year it will be able to do the same.

flu shot

To find out if flu shots are being offered at an airport near you, please see the flu shot chart included with my USATODAY.com column: Airports are ready for passengers seeking flu shots.

LAX hungry for Pink’s; ATL makes art accessible

Art, Food, Restaurants,

Chile dog lovers alert.

No dogs have been sold and no firm opening date has been announced, but fans of Pink’s Hot Dogs are all atwitter over the fact that the legendary Hollywood eatery will be opening its first airport outlets at Los Angeles International Airport’s (LAX) Tom Bradley International Terminal (TBIT) “later this year.”  Stay tuned.

LAX PINKS

Over at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), they’ve (finally) re-organized the Web site so it’s easier to find all the information about the art, culture and history exhibits scattered around the airport.

So now, before you even get to the airport, you can learn all about the juried exhibition of paper clothing on display in the Paper Runway exhibit in Gallery T :

ATL Paper Runway Mitchell_Liz_Closeup_Worn_Slippers

and the replica 33-foot-long  Yangchuanosaurus skeleton in the Airport Atrium that’s on loan from the Fernbank Museum of Natural History;

atl-dinoand the six cases in Concourse E that are filled with puppets from Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts.

ATL PUppet

For more information about all the art at ATL, see the Airport Art Program tab on the ATL Web site.

Stuck at Atlanta Airport? Don’t forget about all the art.

Art,

If you’re traveling through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport this summer, keep in mind (especially during long layovers) that there more than 250 works of art and several history displays throughout the airport.

In addition to an exhibit about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. atlanta-airport-mlk-exhibit-bigger-image

there’s an impressive of collection of more than twenty sculptures by a dozen of Zimbabwe’s top sculptors.

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There are also a variety of colorful large format murals and, to honor the International Year of Astronomy, an exhibition of out-of-this-world images marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first recorded observations through a telescope.

ATL earth to universe

Baggage container sucked into airplane engine

Baggage, Weird,

This is scary. According to this news report, a baggage container, or can, got sucked in the engine of an airplane pulling away from the terminal at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Monday afternoon (May 11, 2009).

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

No doubt the folks at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) are glad that they’ve already scheduled their 8th annual FOD walk for this Thursday, May 14, 2009.

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During a scheduled 30-minute shutdown, about 150 volunteers will sweep the runway, picking up FOB – foreign object debris – such as plastics, metals, luggage straps, the stray baggage container, and anything else that might become airborne and end up lodged in an airplane engine.

Airport pub crawl: sure path to jet-lag AND a hangover

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Jet-lag (when you’re “internally desychronized”) is no fun. It’s vexing when you’ve arrived in a new city at 6 a.m. and can’t keep your eyes open.  It’s maddening when it jostles you awake at 3 in the morning.

There are plenty of jet-lag remedies floating around out there. Some work. Others work only if you say a special chant.   One way to insure jet-lag, as well as a hangover: an airport pub crawl that includes some – or all – of the spots in this Forbes Traveler article: America’s Best Airport Bars.

Recommended spots include:  Vino Volo wine bars in Washington, D.C, Seattle, Detroit and other cities;  Cibi Bistro and Wine Bar at PHL,  DEN’s New Belgium Hub Bar & Grill, the Woodford Reserve Bar & Grill at the Louisville, Kentucky Airport, re:vive at JFK’s Terminal 5,  Laurelwood Brewing Company pubs at PDX, and the Shipyard Brewing Company at Maine’s Portland Int’l Jetport.

Also on the list: the Sweetwater Draft House at ATL, the Heineken Lounge at EWR,  and Squatters Pub and the Wasatch Brew Pub, both at the Salt Lake City airport.

Drink up, but bring aspirin.

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