I don’t like flying, it makes me nervous and cranky… I hadn’t flown since, oh, 2002. You’d think perhaps I would bring a book onboard and try to distract myself, but no…
I prefer to let my mind wander about the aircraft. How long has it been since they banned smoking on planes? Sometime in the ‘80s, wasn’t it? So why do they still have the “no smoking” icon overhead? And no flat screen TVs, old cathode tube units instead. Hmmmm. Just how old are those planes, anyway, I wondered, glancing nervously at the wing flexing at 39000 feet.
In this 1960’s décor of cream and gray plastic, I tried to imagine myself as Dave Bowman on the shuttle to the moon, but no dice.
Funny how some pilots are smoother than others, and how you can tell by the way they land and take off.
The pilot who flew us into Orlando was Army aviation and a former Ranger, as one could tell from the stickers on his Halliburton case. Well…. The way he landed felt like some fat guy walking and rearranging his drawers, bouncing left and right, side to side, almost to the point where I thought the wings might touch the ground.
The skies aren’t quite as friendly as they used to be, I noticed.
The attendants on all four flights I took earlier this week weren’t rude per se, but they were watchful and unsmiling, just this side short of impatient.
Planes aren’t comfortable unless you fly first class I guess. Aaaah, first class, where booze and wine seemed to flow and people fart through silk…
But it’s on the return flights that I found myself staring at the cranium poking from the headrest before me, thinking about playing the game they played in “the orphanage”: knock three times on the seat back, saying “uno, dos, tres, toca la pared”.
But then, if it held that whatever’s behind you gets closer and closer everytime you turned after saying it, I was afraid the plane’d look like this:
But Miami at night and altitude looked a bit like Inca or Aztec designs, and the Northern end of the Everglades in the afternoon seemed an ominous landscape of tan and black. At night somewhere between Texas and New Mexico, we could have been on a spaceship.
Well… It’s good to be home. Flying gets no jellybeans.
Never enjoyed flying myself…. Not at all….. A real problem given that I’m an east coast girl and all the rest of my family is waaaay out in California. So I get where you are coming from.
It’s probably why I haven’t seen my parents in person much over the years since college. Always preferred phone calls for that… and I reeeeaaally hate using the phone, Hehehehe!! (But then my phone has never crashed on me with no survivors….. so I’m sticking with it as my main way to keep in touch with the folks)