Remind me never to fly into Philadelphia again. It’s close to other eastern city airports. Tell me to fly into them, rent a car, and then drive to my Pennsylvania destination.
To keep things in perspective: it was not the quintessential undiluted nightmare scenario of sitting on the tarmac for 13 hours without food, water or working lavatories, which is my personal standard of the truly horrible air travel experience. It was only an hour and a half waiting in Minneapolis because of the back-up in Philadelphia, and then another hour waiting in Philadelphia after arriving, and then on return to Minneapolis two days later, waiting again for almost an hour in Philadelphia because they were all backed up. On that leg I was next to John Ginormitron, a six foot five inch, circus big, hairy white guy IN SHORTS who took up fully half the air space of my seat. Sitting on the wing would have been more comfortable. Unfortunately I couldn’t fully hate him because his air travel sob story was way worse than mine. He and his family (yes, screaming kids, too. But that’s still a choice) got to the airport at 4:30 AM, and, after a number of ridiculously unlikely fiascos, wound up finally on my 5:22 PM departing flight that actually took off at 7:30. And he was a pretty nice guy, even after all that. A nice, super huge, guy. I just made myself a two-dimensional, piece-of-paper-person pressed up against the inside of the plane, face shmooshed up against the window, coveting all that nice, open space outside the window.
Even though, and in spite of all that, I still love flying. What I love best is the take-off when this huge, multi-ton, metal container goes faster and faster and faster and you fear you’ll just run off the end of the road but then, LIFT, up up up up, and you’re flying. Flying! What a crazy, miraculous thing. And you watch the earth drop away from you, and your stomach feels buoyant, and you see this living geography below you, with cars and the lakes you just ran around this morning, and it’s like seeing it on TV because it’s framed by the window, but it’s real, and those are real people in their cars, talking on their cell phones and texting like idiots. You are detached from the earth, like a spaceship only in a lower orbit, and if you’re flying alone, all your people are down there, and here you are, in space, flying above everything. It’s pretty cool.
