As a child we travelled a lot by ferry, sometimes crossings of the 8 plus hours variety, all weathers Steve and I went to France with the twinning association in November with the associated rough ferry crossings with no ill effects. I think it was the grounding in long trips that set me up for life to handle long distance travel. Even Steve who isn't mad about flying manages flights to California without issue.
I wasn't always a mad flyer, one of the events of 2003 apart from deciding to train as a teacher was that I cured myself of my 20 year self imposed grounding from my fear of flying.
You read that right, me, scared of flying.
Picking Dennis or Janet up from an airport gave me the willies, I got off a display plane at Duxford because it made me scared to walk down the aisle. Try as I might I couldnt see how anyone could actually travel on a plane without screaming. Al had his 4th birthday treat flight to Scotland without me. Duncan went to the USA for work on his own ..... nothing would have got me on a plane..I had to be tranquilized to fly to Spain in 1986 and stayed well clear from that moment on.
It was like this...... I was watching a TV programme an out Annie Proulx and how she wrote "That old ace in the hole " (which I still haven't read) and the country around her looked so vast and so wild, desolate, amazing that I just knew at that moment that I would be able to get over my fear of flying and visit amazing places like that.
So the 24th of February 2003 saw me and Dunc on a Ryanair flight to Brussels, I was a bit wobbly on the way back but by May 2003 the three of us were on a flight to Philadelphia to visit Max who had moved there .
And the rest, as they say is history.
I didn't fly over the Atlantic by myself for another couple of years , once I had a "how am I going to get home" in Philly, cured by a bottle of Heineken, but the die had been cast, the bug had been caught and there was no stopping me, no stopping us....I am proud that Al got to visit so many fabulous places while he was young, even more so now because he has so many memories of Dunc that he can look back on.
Where was I ?.... The flight.... The flight to Hawaii is one of the longest overwater sectors there is, over the Pacific, I have plenty of experience of rough flights over the Atlantic, turbulence and the associated roller coaster ride was never part of my fear of flying, I love coming into Philly at stormy time of year, seeing the skies light up with flashes of lightning, feeling the plane buck in the invisible bumps in the air, I don't scare easily. The Pacific is known for its share of turbulent weather but to me, it doesn't seem that big a deal. 4 1/2 hours of watching I player and eating and drinking was uneventful, a couple of brief seat belt on interludes. The Pilot announced that there was rough weather ahead and had the cabin prepared for landing early so the cabin crew could sit down and buckle in as well. Moderate chop was the predicted level of bounce, now I have been in enough turbulence to know that people often over exaggerate the severity of their experiences, only once have I been in moderate chop and this certainly wasn't moderate chop at all. It did give me a chance to test my theory that I always yawn in turbulence, sur enough I started to yawn . It is actually a form of travel sickness, I don't feel ill in the slightest, my stomach stays resolutely calm, I just yawn. How strange is that.
I don't think Al could quite believe his eyes, the ramp down from the plane to the tarmac, the collection of gazebos that is the airport waiting lounge, the airport in Maui is rustic but this is more like the cafe area at Colchester zoo..
Standard Ford Focus collected, we headed to get some drinks and snacks, then on to a coffee plantation to see and taste.
We stopped by the beach to look at the waves, Al still trying to take it all in.
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