Airplanes

I hate all travel that involves sitting down for long periods of time. Driving a car, sitting on a bus, flying. All of these take something away from the experience of travel. By the time this blog is published I will have traveled roughly six thousand miles in a thirteen hour period and nearly all of that will have been spent sitting down in a flying cigar tube at thirty thousand feet. The fact that I can fly six thousand miles in thirteen hours is a technological miracle matched only by our species regularly launching people and objects into space. Despite this incredible power of man and machine, something is lost in our travel. Something visceral and real. People don't value travel anymore because it simply isn't difficult anymore. Sure, standing in line and sitting down for eleven hours is a pain in the ass, but a relatively small price to pay to get to Tokyo from Los Angeles on the same day. If you told someone seventy years ago that an airplane carrying over two hundred people could cross the Pacific Ocean in less than a day without refueling you would be laughed at. Now that same feat is accomplished hundreds of times a day. United Airlines by itself is responsible for nearly six thousand flights in a single twenty four hour period, and they do this for three hundred and sixty five days a year. Six thousand times a day a metal bird hurls itself off the ground and lands safely, hours and miles later. And that's just one airline.

A few years back my brother and I took a canoe down the Rio Grande from Albuquerque to Las Cruces. The distance is roughly two hundred and fifty miles as the freeway goes, three hundred and change by river. It took us two weeks. One day we made about seven miles in a ten hour period. Another day we made fifty miles in about fifteen hours. I'd been to Las Cruces more than a dozen times before, but never before had I really known what it was like to travel there. You really get a taste for a place if you've have to earn the right to be there.

I'm not saying I'd like to take a boat to Tokyo, or better yet, row there in a rowboat like someone I know would, but I do feel like I may have missed out on part of this travel. I'll have to be careful of that while I travel and make sure that it's not all about the destination.

Though the destinations are pretty cool, and traveling six thousand miles in under twelve hours is a miracle, albeit a miracle of science.

-Doug