Jacksonsville International Airport

Celebrate Valentine’s Day at the Airport

Holidays, , , ,

Love really is in the air at many airports this Valentine’s Day.

We’ve been gathering news of the events and Valentine’s Day offerings at airports, including the pop-up marriage license bureau at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) in Las Vegas and the carnations and hand-cut felt hearts Philadephia International Airport (PHL) is handing out.

Here are some more events to look for at US airports:

Free Love Poems at Long Beach Airport

Courtesy LGB Airport

On Valentine’s Day, travelers at California’s Long Beach Airport (LGB) will be able to get free custom-crafted love poems while they wait.

Current West Hollywood City Poet Laureate, Brian Sonia-Wallace will be in the airport between 5 pm and 7 pm with an antique Remington typewriter. He’ll commemorate individual travelers’ love stories with poems created and typed out on the spot.

A second typewriter will be available if passengers want to type their own poems or messages.

Free Flowers at Jacksonville International Airport

As they have since 2009, with a pandemic pause, Airport Ambassadors at Florida’s Jacksonville International Airport (JAX) will be handing out more than 1,000 red, white, and pink carnations to travelers and airport visitors on Valentine’s Day.

More Valentine’s Day Offers at Airports

Between 10 am and 12 pm on Valentine’s Day, Orlando International Airport (MCO) will be hosting a special Paw-Pup snuggle booth staffed by several of the therapy pups from the MCO Paw Pilots program. Look for the booth by the airport’s atrium fountain.

Be among the first to show up you may be one of the lucky dogs who wins a pair of Paw Pilots socks modeled by the pup in the photo.

Need some Valentines? San Jose Mineta International Airport (SJC) and John Glen Columbus International Airport (CMH) have you covered. And Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is offering a Valentine discount code (good through 2/19/23) for 25% off mobile orders at LAXOrderNow.com.

Airport Lobster and other great amenities

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Airports are still spending lots of time and energy reminding passengers to wear their masks, wash their hands, and observe social distancing protocols.

But we are pleased to see that airports are also getting back to the business of promoting (OK, showing off) some great, unusual, and much-appreciated amenities.

Here a few that popped up on Twitter just today:

*Free goodies, including historic postcards from Jacksonville International Airport (JAX):

*The return of lobster for sale at Canada’s Halifax Stanfield International Airport (YHZ);

*A two-fer from Sacramento International Airport (SMF) – a reminder of their “Flying Carpet” offering a birds-eye view of the area and their convenient CVS vending machine:

*And the news from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) that the Flight Path Museum will be reopening August 7.

Know of a great airport amenity we could be celebrating? Drop a note in the comments section and we’ll check it out.

Flowers for moms at Jacksonville International Airport

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Mother’s Day is Sunday May 8th and volunteers at Jacksonville International Airport will once again be on duty handing out about 1000 red, white and pink carnations to moms passing through the terminal.

This flower thing has become a tradition at JAX airport.  Back in 2009, volunteers handed out carnations on Valentine’s Day and again on Mother’s Day and the response was so positive that they decided to keep going.

(From the George Eastman House collection, via Flickr Commons)

Jacksonville International Airport offers travelers some other nice perks year-round. There’s an art gallery that hosts a variety of temporary exhibitions and permanent art that includes the work of Gregor Tuck, who cataloged the wide variety of gendered pictograms and glazed them onto the tiles surrounding the restroom entryways on Concourse C.

And if your mother was here, you’d know what she’d say… “Go before you get on the plane…”

Airports offer fresh art for travelers

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If you enjoy spending your leisure time visiting art galleries, but instead end up wasting time in airports, you’re in luck. This season, many airports around the country are hosting intriguing temporary exhibitions and unveiling new permanent public artwork that can turn a long layover into a cultural adventure. Or at least keep you from getting bored.

Here are a few highlights of fresh airport art from my current “At the Airport” column on USATODAY.com.

Included in the story is the  “Environmental Steward-ess” outfit Nancy Judd of Recycle Runway made out of old leather seat covers from Delta Air Lines.

 

There’s also a new exhibit at New York’s Albany International Airport. In Keeping Time, seven artists explore nostalgia with “an eye for its intimate, humorous and often bittersweet nature,” says Sharon Bates, director of the airport’s art and culture program. Included in the show are paintings, several large site-specific installations and collages made from old paint-by-number paintings.

It's in the Book - by Ken Ragsdale

 

And, at Florida’s Jacksonsville International Airport, there’s a fun exhibition titled Kites and Flights with work by Melanie Walker and George Peters.

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Fresh art at Jacksonville International Airport

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There’s a new aerial sculpture at Jacksonville International Airport (JAX).

Sky Bridges, by artists Melanie Walker and George Peters of Airworks Studio, hangs from the ceiling of JAX’s newly renovated connector bridge.

Kites and Flights, also by Walker and Peters, is on display in the airport’s Haskell Art Gallery through June 2011.

The exhibit uses kites to depict a variety of flying objects including birds, insects, leaves in the wind, clouds, airplanes, balloons and rockets.

 

Airports – and an airline – celebrate Valentine’s Day

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If you find yourself at an airport on Valentine’s Day, buy yourself and your sweetie some chocolate. And some flowers.

On Monday, these airports are among those that will be offering a little extra love:

The Food & Shops in the Central Terminal Building at New York’s LaGuardia Airport will be handing out free chocolate kisses.

Volunteers at Florida’s Jacksonville International Airport will be handing out carnations;

At Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Amy’s Ice-Cream has a pop-up kiosk in the baggage claim area selling chocolate-covered strawberries (2/12 -2/14);

And passengers on Southwest Airlines can celebrate the day with a complimentary adult beverage on all flights.

Tidbits for travelers: news from JAX, PHL, and ATL

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On Valentine’s Day, volunteers at Jacksonville International Airport (JAX) handed out 1700 red and white carnations to arriving and departing passengers.

(Photo courtesy Jacksonsville International Airport )

On Tuesday (February 16, 2010) Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) had a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new Terminal E expansion, which includes seven gates for Southwest Airlines and several new food and retail outlets, including a news/gift shop, a McDonalds, and a sit-down restaurant called Cantina Laredo.  The new expansion also brings new artwork to the airport, courtesy of Philadelphia’s Percent for Art Program. Look for Cloudsphere, by Philadelphia artist Mei-ling Hom in the rotunda.

(Photo courtesy Philadelphia International Airport )

And congratulations to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL): it’s Paper Runway exhibit of wearable paper clothing and accessories made with everything from banana leaf fibers to recycled cotton rags and coffee filters, won an award from the Georgia Association of Museums and Galleries.

Look for “Paper Runway” in the cases in the walkway connecting the main security area and Concourse T.  But hurry: the exhibit will only be there through March.

More fun freebies at airports

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Free is good. And these days many small and mid-size airports are trying to build loyalty by offering travelers free amenities.

In my At the Airport column this month on USAToday.com, I write (again) about the free cookies they hand out at Indiana’s Fort Wayne International Airport as well as some of the fun freebies offered at other airports.

Florida’s  Jacksonville International Airport distributes free flowers to passengers each year on Valentine’s Day and on Mother’s Day.

The Reno-Tahoe International Airport offers free local phone calls year-round.

In Milwaukee, home of Harley-Davidson Motor Company and the Harley-Davidson Museum, the General Mitchell International Airport offers free parking for any traveler who arrives on a motorcycle.

At Ohio’s Port Columbus International Airport, children are given free crayons and blank post-paid postcards and asked to please mail back a picture from their travels for display in an airport gallery. The airport has also purchased its own popcorn machine and hands out free bags of popcorn during quarterly customer appreciation days. “It’s a great way for us to say thanks,” says CMH communications manager Angie Tabor, “Plus, who doesn’t love the smell of popcorn?”

And in Wisconsin, the Outagamie County Regional Airport gives out free toothbrushes.

Airport marketing manager Kim Sippola says: “We noticed that many business travelers would get off the plane, go into the bathroom, and search through their bags for a toothbrush because they were going right from the airport to a meeting. So we thought we’d reduce some stress for our customers by providing them with toothbrushes.”

The airport partnered with a local dentist and now stocks post-security bathrooms with travel-sized oral hygiene kits that contain mouthwash, dental floss and a toothbrush with a single-serving of toothpaste.

Have you found a great airport freebie? Please let us know so we can tell other travelers about it.

Airport art (and coincidence) at ATL and JAX

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Over the holidays I spent a few hours hanging out at the (north) end of the International Concourse at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). When I wasn’t watching the TSA guys with the anxious-looking dogs, I was checking out all the art.

I was intrigued by the set of sculptures stretched out on walls of one gate area.  The airplane I recognized. Some of the other shapes, looked like, well, just shapes.

Turns out, that’s the point.  On his Web site, artist Gregor Turk explains that these 64 sculptures, part of a piece titled Latitudes and Legends, is made of sculptures derived from the symbols used on maps from around the world.

By removing the symbols from their context, my intent was to shift the shapes from miniature, benign marks to totems and icons with ambiguous meanings. The symbols represent a range of natural and manmade structures found on maps including different types of roads, water features, aerial obstructions, and places of worship.


By delightful coincidence, just hours after I got around to looking up the story of Turk’s ATL artwork, I got an email from Chris McGinnis alerting me to his post on The Ticket about a public art piece called Pictograms ( above and below) at Florida’s Jacksonville International Airport(JAX) created by an old friend of his:  Gregor Turk!

For Pictograms, Turk covered the entranceways to a pair of  JAX restrooms with tiles bearing lots of different versions of the generic gender symbols from around the world.

Again from his Web site, he explains:

“At facilities that employ a greater sense of design, highly stylized pictograms reflect a much greater range in variations of body types, shapes, proportions, and activities. When the images of the respective figures are shown collectively, their typological differences become apparent, even amusing.”

You’ll find Gregor Turk’s Pictograms on Concourse C at Jacksonville International Airport.

(Thanks, Chris!)

Take your mom to the airport

Holidays,

Two Florida airports have scheduled special events to honor moms on Mother’s Day.

white-carnations

Volunteers at the Jacksonville International Airport (JAX)will be handing out long-stemmed white carnations to mothers traveling through the airport on Mother’s Day, May 10th from 8 am until 6 pm.

fashionshowAnd from May 7 – 9, to prep for Mother’s Day, Miami International Airport (MIA) will have a sidewalk sale in the Central Terminal area and live music performances in Terminals G, F and E.

On Saturday, May 9th, from 1- 2 pm, the airport will also host a fashion show in front of the $10 Boutique.