Suzy Says

Love/Hate for Friday, March 22, 2002

Travel: The Process

I have travelled a fair bit in my life, mostly because my father was English. When his parents were alive, we’d visit them every other year, and when my father retired back to England, I visited him there at least once a year. Since he was conveniently located in London, it was easy to go all over Europe and even as far as Russia.

Even though I have done this, and am planning to go to London yet again this year, I hate the travelling process. Number one, I’m afraid of flying. I was worried about it even before 9/11, and that certainly didn’t help matters. Mostly, it’s just that I can’t believe this huge hunk of metal is going to stay in the sky, and if you’re flying between San Francisco and London (11 fun-filled hours, and that’s non-stop), much of it is over the Arctic, so if the worst happens, you’re pretty much toast (or ice cubes). But I have developed my own guide to surviving air travel:

1. Avoid going coach if at all possible. Somehow I feel less likely to die when I have more legroom and am being pampered. You also get something close to real food and get to get off the plane first. Negative: If the plane crashes nose first, you’ll get a few less seconds than the poor folks in cattle class. Of course, you could look at it as the express lane to the afterlife.

2. Drink as much champagne as possible. If you have avoided going coach, the champagne is free, so you have no excuse not to drink it. You also get a glass before you take off, which is when you really need it. Both the likelihood of the plane crashing and the fear of it are severely diminished by at least two glasses of champagne. Negative: You will have to pee a lot. So get an aisle seat.

3. Try and get a Valium or two. You probably know someone who has it. Think of all those neurotic friends and relatives, not to mention co-workers. Make something up if you have to so they feel sorry enough for you to give it to you. Who cares if they think you’re neurotic? They’re the ones with a whole prescription, for God’s sake. It’s worth the trouble to get some — it really does take the edge off the horror.

4. Diversion is critical. Bring lots of things to read, and a Walkman or portable DVD player is good, too (though with the DVD player, you’ll probably get unwanted people looking over your shoulder). I usually hoard “New Yorkers” for about a month before the flight and bring at least two books. It amazes me that people will get on a plane knowing the flight is 11 hours long with NOTHING TO READ. The in-flight magazine is not that interesting. Trust me.

Basically, air travel is public transportation, and that’s the other main drawback to it. PT is something I try to avoid as much as possible. I walk to work, and I should walk home, but when I don’t feel like it, I take a cab. The closest I get to public transportation is taking the cable car, but its charm kind of overrides the public transit aspect. As Dorothy Parker observed, other people are hell, and being stuck in lines behind them for hours doesn’t endear the human race to you. I will never understand why the people ahead of me are always checking huge boxes held together with string, countless suitcases, and have to talk to the person checking them in for 15-20 minutes. Whereas when I get to the desk, I’m done in 30 seconds. This may have something to do with the fact that even if I’m doomed to cattle class, I only have one carry-on bag and have my seat pre-assigned.

Once wedged on the plane, you are surrounded by the people who held you up in line. There will be at least one screaming baby and one kid who keeps meandering up and down the aisle, pursued by its ineffectual parent(s). The person in front of you will jack his/her seat back as far as it can go and leave it there for the duration of the flight, eliminating what little personal space you had to begin with. You will be served unidentifiable and inedible food at very strange times. You will be at the mercy of the various diseases owned by your fellow travellers, who are only too happy to share. You will have to wait in line for the bathroom, which gets less and less salubrious with every hour that passes. Someone will be drunk and loud. People will take pictures of each other sitting on the plane. There will be boring conversations (time for the Walkman). If you’re a girl on your own, guys will feel not only that they can talk to you, but that talking to them is preferable to being left alone. You explain the error of their ways firmly enough that they go away. Time will slow to a crawl. You will doze weirdly and wonder if you’re there yet.

Then when you do get there, more waiting in line at Customs, and if you checked your bags, fervent praying that your bags made it, too. There are no atheists in Baggage Claim.

It’s definitely better than the days when you either had to sail around the even more deadly than air travel Cape Horn or take a train across the vast expanse of the USA, then cross the also deadly Atlantic by ship, all of this taking weeks and weeks. And the Concorde, when it isn’t killing people, is pretty fast, though it only goes from New York. But why haven’t the scientists gotten together and developed a faster way to get where you’re going, as featured in Star Trek? That would pretty much eliminate most of the horrors of the way we travel now, and it would be almost fast enough for me, too.