Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
The wild blue yonder
Tomorrow is a big travel day. We will depend on Southwest Airlines to safely deliver us to La Guardia airport in New York City, then we’ll Uber to the New Jersey side of New York City. It’s all in honor of Alexander, who will be becoming four years old on Monday. One of the other set of grandparents is already there, building up the suspense for a little boy whose hero is Iron Man, and whose wish is that he gets every Iron Man toy in the Universe.
I have been traveling since I was an infant of six weeks of age and General Motors transferred my Pop to Mexico City, where I grew up. That is 73 years of experience on airplanes. Things have changed, and not for the better. In my opinion, anyway. Flying in the 50’s and 60’s usually meant a meal service on china with cloth napkins. Children were allowed to visit the pilot in the cockpit and to get to wear a pin of wings and the airline logo.
I’ve flown on now extinct Dodo airlines: TWA, Pan American, Braniff, Ozark, and probably others that I can’t remember. In their day, TWA and Pan Am carried people to sites all across the globe. I would be rich with “points” if these two still existed. “Points” are a gimmick – whenever I brag that I got a “free flight” using points, my daughter has to point out that I put thousands of dollars on my Southwest card in order to get said points. Spoil sport.
Air travel is one of the safest means of transportation, except when it isn’t. I can only remember a few flights where turbulence raised its ugly head and sent our stomachs on a wild ride. I have white knuckled a couple of flights in a small two engine aircraft. One memorable ride was when I arrived in Rio de Janeiro on my way home to Sao Paulo, Brazil. It’s not that big a distance, so I got on a puddle jumper and settled in my seat. I always try for an aisle seat and this time was no different. But the plane was so small that only a curtain separated us from the cockpit. They didn’t really keep the curtain closed so I had a view into the pilots’ domain. They apparently were not concerned with airline regulations regarding alcohol consumption by pilots before a flight. These two drank while IN-FLIGHT. I could watch them passing a bottle with brown liquid between them, and it wasn’t iced tea. Fortunately it was a short enough ride that they didn’t have time to get really impaired.
These days there is no such thing as china plates and cloth napkins unless you happen to fly first class. Southwest doesn’t even have a first class section so we are all recipients of pretzels and free soda. There is a fee for alcoholic beverages, another thing that used to be free. (See, this is the problem with getting old – the golden years are not now, they occurred when we were young!). Anyway, I do love Southwest because they do not gouge people with fees for checking a suitcase, they are really easy to deal with if a flight has to be changed or cancelled, and their flight attendants tend to have a really good sense of humor. I appreciate that.
Now that I’m older and less patient, if I don’t watch myself I can get into a snit if the airport is crowded and the lines mean slow service. I can also get irritated with the size of the seats on the aircraft. There’s even a term for me – I am a person “of size”. So I don’t always fit into a seat with any room to spare. That is both embarrassing and aggravating. But I’m working on this problem so that one day I can slip easily into a seat and comfortably occupy my own personal space.
So, tomorrow. We’ll Uber to the airport and get on a non-stop flight, (a rarity with Southwest), and fly to the East Coast. Jan has been worried about the potential of freezing temperature affecting our ability to fly. That is, until I googled what the temperature of the air is at 30,000 feet and found out that up there is it minus 48 degrees. No worries. Our aircraft will handle it. Bring on the wild blue yonder.