Astute and/or assiduous readers will have realized that I spent the last two-and-a-half weeks in sunny Southern California with family, attending a wedding, lying on the beach, going to Disneyland, missing out on getting drunk with Ken Goldstein while he visited Seattle, and taking lots and lots of photos.

What better way to end a visit to the greater metropolitan area of Los Angeles than with this two-hour human traffic jam at LAX? That’s about half of the outdoor line to get through security. The other half is behind me, and I’d estimate that there were about as many people actually inside waiting as you can see here outside.

As it turned out, I made my flight, but only becasue they were so foolish and/or kind as to hold the flight for a full twenty minutes, something I learned to my surprise when I sauntered around the corner to my gate, expecting to be put on standby for a morning flight.

On the plus side: it was a reasonably thorough, if unreasonably slow, inspection. I have no idea why the jam developed; I can’t say I saw any security people working particularly slowly, and there were six to eight security portals, the same number I saw at SeaTac on the way out.

There was some poor line management conducted by airline personnell, however. At one point we were instructed to form a new “express” line for people with departure times between 6 and 6:30 – naturally, that line immediately became longer than the non-express line.

And, just to keep things fun, this was much, much longer than any of the lines we encountered at Disneyland.