From Road Trip To Plane Flight

Planes are entirely different beasts compared to cars. I know I wrote something like this last year but it bears repeating, especially when I’ve experienced two particularly long trips of both varieties in the past few weeks. The lack of a view of the outside speeding by on a plane for example, unless you’re lucky or quick or both, is of particular note and only serves to exacerbate just how long you’re expected to be in one spot. And even when you can look out the window, at thirty-thousand feet, there’s not much else to see besides clouds.

Cars also have the option of stopping, while planes do not. And sure, not every place along the interstate is particularly interesting, but it’s the stopping that matters. Maybe more important than that, though, is the starting. Packing either way is the same, but there’s a lot more hassle in the act of getting onto an airplane.

I guess that’s the trade-off? Like, planes go quicker, but there’s also this feeling that I’m just accepting how air travel is these days. Which is often- well, there’s a reason comedians make quick jokes about it. So it’s not quite “unacceptable,” but it’s not the greatest. And outside of dedicated road-trip comedies, there isn’t the same amount of angst built in to travel by car.

But that also could be just a bias for the thing that’s been around longer. People have traveled for as long as there have been people, and (from my uneducated viewpoint) the jump from walking to horse to car seems like a natural progression. Flying, on the other hand, despite the mythologization of flying cars in media, just doesn’t fit that progression.

I am, of course, overlooking buses, which people do angst about on occasion. I will say I don’t personally have too much experience with the long-distance bus side of travel so I don’t know if that’s a better comparison or not. But I’ll close by wondering if there’s a way to find the best aspects of all three (or more?) and combine them into a new form of travel that’s much easier to appreciate. It’s certainly nice to imagine, at the very least. I can also imagine, though, that new mode just getting added to the pile of options, and the rest of the world just driving or flying along.

-F