4. Flying and Airports

My first instinct was to title this entry "Travelling" but the term travel often connotates vacation, escape or relaxation, and I'm definitely in favor of all that, so to minimize confusion I opted for "Flying and Airports" as the object of my rantings.

I know exactly where it all started - I'm at no pains to pinpoint the source of my hatred for commercial airline travel - living in Saudi Arabia during my early teen and pre-teen years, and having limited options for my education that didn't involve Quran study and nomadic desert survival training, I was shipped off to boarding school in California. The "perk" that came with this arrangement was that I was generously allowed three annual trips back to Arabia to see my family, usually during summer break, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I say generously in all seriousness! My father worked (and still does) for the largest oil company in the world and they sell their oil for a lot of money, but it's still difficult to attract talented engineers and professionals without some thrown-in incentives, so in this spirit they provided a lump-sum amount for each of these trips sufficient to convey me from Los Angeles to Dhahran in all the luxury and opulence of first class, but my ever-enterprising parents opted to find the cheapest tickets they could and pocket the difference*... the result was multiple layovers in obscure international locations and flights on rickety old prop planes that said Bob and Larry airways on the side - I swear I remember there being caged chickens and goats and loud Latin salsa music on one flight... **

...OK so international travel in coach isn't quite that bad, but it’s pretty close. Our family's very first trip from the U.S. to Arabia was in first class on a big new 747, and that was my first foray into the world of airborne travel. I started thinking this wasn't going to be too bad - big cushy recliner seats with leg rests that pop up, an in-flight movie, good food, and stewardesses that attend to your every need. I remember at one point, however, I got the hankering to explore and made my way past the heavy curtain separating first class, which had been all I had known to that point, from the coach section. To say that the revelation was a shock would be a gross understatement. Here were veritable ACRES of grown people - adults - sitting squished into chairs clearly made for dolls, all looking at me with sunken eyes and beggarly expressions. They'd been riding like this for over ten hours, and still had another five or more to go before we got to Amsterdam. I'm almost certain that had there not been a rather stern-looking stewardess standing there beside me, they might have tried to eat me...

...alas, it wasn't to be long before I was one of them myself and, given the chance, I might also have tried to eat any plump little morsels that strayed back from the front of the plane. The trip from Los Angeles to Dhahran is a long one no matter how you cut it, but throw in a couple extra stops and some long layovers and you almost have to start measuring in light years. I specifically remember one gem where my itinerary looked like this: Los Angeles to Denver to Minneapolis (8 hours in the airport) to New York to London (switch AIRPORTS - Heathrow to Gatwick in London) to Amsterdam (overnight in Amsterdam) to Bahrain to Dhahran. I was in Dhahran for 18 hours, during which time I gave blood (since the company clinic will pay good money), then got back on the plane – probably the same one – and did the whole thing over again in reverse…

The business model of coach class makes sense - pack 'em in tight then squeeze ‘em even more to get as many butts in seats as possible, but at least back then you could get tickets at reasonable prices and they didn't nickel and dime you for every little thing. Today, with the decrease in leisure travel after 9/11 and high oil prices*** you can only find affordable flights if you want to depart at 2:10 am and have an 8 hour layover in Swahanawamee. Then they charge you extra if you want to check a bag, eat anything on the plane, have a seat cushion...

…and you have to go through the whole ordeal with a smile and an impeccably polite demeanor, and make no complaints or on the return flight they'll put you next to some elephantine circus freak renowned around the world for his horrendous personal hygiene

* I can't really complain too much about the arrangement since the extra money went toward my college tuition. :)

** Though my comments here were in jest, that TRULY does describe what long bus tips were like in Venezuela on my mission (except that instead of saying Bob and Larry on the side it said Roberto y Lorenzo) - even that somehow, just by not being in the air, was better than airline travel...

***As a quick aside to the high oil prices comment, however, I was pleasantly surprised to see the first number in the per-gallon price be a 2 rather than a 3 when I filled up yesterday - first time in a long time...