Air travel

The first time I travelled on an airplane, I was seventeen and visiting Britain and France with my parents. (It was a redeye flight across the Atlantic.) I noticed that the plane's engines had the Rolls-Royce trademark.  They showed the movie California Suite, a Neil Simon comedy about travellers in a hotel, which was the perfect movie to watch on an airplane.

And when I was eighteen I took a small turboprop plane from Moncton to Halifax.  In the course of the flight, I got an aerial view of my hometown Sackville, N.B., as we flew over it.  It looked flatter than I expected.

My scariest experience on a plane happened when I was returning from Japan and flying over the Pacific Ocean.  We ran into some major turbulence, which made me start wondering what keeps any plane in the air.  I also remember the time I was flying over the Great Plains and saw a thunderhead cloud whose shape reminded me of Godzilla.

If you ask me, we should be getting people off of planes and back onto trains.  We hear about subsidies for Amtrak, yet Washington gives much bigger subsidies to the airlines.  Such a high volume of air travel inevitably led to the security net wearing thin, resulting in 9/11.

I've never flown in a helicopter or a balloon.