Seth Stevenson on the limitations of air travel
“Riding in a commercial jetliner simply isn’t traveling, as far as I’m concerned. It’s teleporting from point A to point B. You spend the entire time in the air just waiting to land, and afterward you speak of the flight only if it’s to complain about the turbulence or the snoring of the dude who sat next to you. The trip itself is nothing. A blank. A means of skipping ahead instead of wading through. And it’s precisely when we’re wading through that we often stumble upon the joy, misery, serendipity, and disaster of a true adventure.”
–Seth Stevenson, Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World
July 12th, 2011 at 6:48 pm
I do last minute reading and planning. I make notes of things I forgot to do before I left. I start my journal. While waiting for my flight at SFO I paid attention to the people at my gate who were going back home to Mexico and the folks at the next gate who were going back home to South Korea. That was worth at least half a page in my journal. I ask my seatmate where he is going and why. I look out the window at the earth changing below us. It is a different experience than travel by ocean liner or dirigible — and about which the same sort of complaint could be made — but we all should try to be the sort of person on whom nothing is wasted.
And even if you think your air time a complete waste, consider it the cost of getting where you want to go without having to spend weeks walking through places you don’t want to be. Though I suppose you will probably stumble across more of the joy, misery, serendipity and disaster of a true adventure if you have to walk through the Darien Gap every time you want to go to Rio for the Carnival.