Travel Log

I'm not flying this summer. As much as I enjoy the periodic airplane trip, I am a little relieved to be free of what has become an increasingly arcane experience. My wife and I have reasoned, with a little creative math, that the trip we take on Interstate Five to Los Angeles in our car takes about as long as the flight would. The lines at the check-in, and security. Taking off your shoes, your belt, and any artificial limbs that might interfere with the scanning procedure all add up. Then you wait in the designated corral for your number to be called, at which point there is more standing around and then sitting around until the point that takeoff occurs. A short hour in the air is compounded by the slow shuffle up the aisle, then out into the terminal and if you are silly enough to check any bags then you can stand at the turntable of luggage to see if you are the lucky winner of the bag that you packed before you left.
In the meantime, we're picking our own music in the car and stopping on the road for an In 'n' Out burger and talking to each other about the best vacation we can remember. It's six hours or so later and though we've put some extra miles on our family wagon, we didn't have to pay for that extra bag of Legos that we absolutely had to bring along. The actual travel time was, door to door, about the same. I don't think I would be up for a lot of cross-country jaunts, but for a trip to the bottom of the state, I think I prefer the open road to the friendly skies. Especially after I read about this guy: Steven Slater, JetBlue flight attendant. He was arrested for cursing out a passenger on an airplane public-address system, grabbing some beer from the galley and exiting on an emergency slide. This hardly ever happens on one of our family road trips, but I'll keep you posted.