By day, airports are a crowded, busy place, full of frenetic energy and emotions as people are traveling from one place to another.
By night, in those wee hours between midnight at 3 a.m., the people are gone. The anxiety of TSA searches, rising fuel costs, flight delays, rushing to make connections, and the stress of everyday life seems to fade into the background.
This photo of the underground people mover at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (ORD) was taken at about 4 am, as I was moving from one terminal to the next for an early morning flight to Washington DC’s National Airport (DCA). Which airport do you like better – the one that’s busy and full of people or the one that is quiet and a little surreal.
Photo credit: Mary Jo Manzanares
Mary Jo Manzanares is a founder and the editor-in-chief of The Traveler’s Way, an online travel magazine proving informational and inspirational travel recommendations for curious Baby Boomer travelers. She has been a speaker at various industry events and has a personal travel blog at Traveling with MJ. When she’s not traveling, Mary Jo likes lingering over a cup of coffee, wandering in a museum, sipping wine at a cafe, and sharing it all with friends and readers. Mary Jo’s top travel destinations are Italy, Portugal, and the Caribbean.
That captures the feeling of late night jetlag!
Funny you should mention that. I slept at the airport that night – well, as much sleeping as 3 hours can get you – and was just shaking the cobwebs out of my head while walking to another terminal. I was so tired and the bright neon of the people mover was pretty jarring. I can only imagine what it would do to someone suffering from real jet lag.
So do they actually turn the silly “spacey” music late at night?