TheOverAnalyzed

I don’t travel much. When I do, it is usually by car, accompanied my wife, and my dog.

The drive to Northern California isn’t horrible. That said, it’s not exactly thrilling either. The 7-8 hour journey is mired with long, long stretches of either desert-y terrain, or SoCal freeways. Neither scenery is much better than the other.

Flying is a much nicer experience:^[1]

1. Arrive at the airport an hour before departure
2. Because I’m lazy and hate lines, I forego checking a bag, and instead send my ‘bag’^[2] with Allison
3. Sit in a terminal for about 40 minutes while I finishing several podcasts and plowing through my read-it-later queue
4. Get on the plane and, an hour later, arrive at my destination

Easy-peasy.

My total travel time was less than three hours.^[3] Compared to the 7-8 hours mentioned previously, that’s a big differential. And, accordingly, flying is a much better option than driving. Obviously, if my flight were some transatlantic one to the UK, one lasting 10+ hours, I might feel differently about my travel preference.I don’t usually fly more than once or twice a year. And because of that, fuselage-ing myself, even for just an hour, is still a novelty for me.

The warm-fuzzies I have for flying has less to do with the actual flying, and more to do with the purpose of flying.

Flying is a way of connecting people, when driving or ‘train’-ing isn’t possible or practical

For whatever reason, this notion hit me hard in the heart strings upon landing at my destination.After my fellow air travelers and I passed onto and then off of the escalators in a sort-of ‘2300 hours zombie-state,’ I passed through the terminal’s exit doors into the pickup/taxi area. And as I did, I saw what appeared to be a father and son embrace each other.

After that, I saw a college-aged girl greet her parents before driving off, followed by what appeared to be a reunion between a 30-something couple.

Perhaps it was my having been separated from my wife for a few days that had me feeling sentimental. But at that moment, it just struck me how, in less than a couple of hours, I had managed to travel almost five hundred miles—a distance that would have costed me almost four times that amount of time via car. And I could imagine other people in that airport who might have traveled even further to reach their destination.

Some of them might have been businesspeople, sure. Perhaps in-between meetings or conferences or something of that sort? But if what I saw in that pickup area was any indication of the ‘business or pleasure’-ness of their travels, it would seem that most of them were traveling to get to reach other people, to connect with people they cared about.

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Being as enthralled with technology as I am, sometimes the actuality of just how far we’ve come is rather lost on me. Right now, I am typing on a Bluetooth keyboard whose inputs are being projected on a 5.5" piece of touchscreen glass.^[4] We couldn’t have even imagined doing something similar before 2007.

As routine as flying has become in these times, I can’t help but feel a sense of amazement that we humans—just another species on this planet—have managed to craft a method of transportation that previous generations could not have fathomed.

And what is even more special about this is how we can enjoy the fruits of our labors every time we use air travel to further connect us to each other.