Getting There: Palermo traffic raises appreciation of Baltimore

Foreign travel teaches transportation lessons

To catch our flight in Philadelphia, we took Amtrak to the 30th Street Station and transferred to a subway to the airport — a viable option if you're not carrying an excess of luggage. The subway cost? A most reasonable $7 per person.

One oddity of our travel experience is that of all the transportation centers we passed through — including airports in Philly, Lisbon, Madrid and Palermo — by far the most visible and heavily armed security was at the 30th Street Station. Either security officials received specific, credible evidence of an imminent threat or there has been a serious misallocation of counterterrorism resources in the United States.

If there's any one thing we came away with from our travels, it was a feeling of how challenging and rewarding it can be to travel on your own in a place where you don't speak the language. In Portugal and Italy, as in most countries in which we've traveled, people went out of their way to be helpful.

One can only hope that when foreign visitors come to Baltimore, they are treated as well as we were. If they are, they will discover that Getting There really is half the fun.

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