Travel Stories

[Sandra Craft]

All these stories are reminding me why I avoid travel.  Also this story of mine:

I used to be afraid of flying, so when a business trip took me from California to Florida I decided to take the train.  Everyone I knew loved traveling by train and told me how much fun I'd have.  The trip took 3 days (2 of them in Texas, I swear) and I didn't sleep the entire time.  A sleeping car was too expensive and it turns out I can't sleep while sitting up on a train.  I had to wash up in tiny bathroom, eat terrible food and, nearly as bad as not sleeping, endure endless hours of boredom.  The train got to Kissimmee FL at 3 a.m. and I staggered into the station dirty, sweaty, gummy and only half conscious but fortunately there was a cab driver there, talking to the ticket girl.  He drove me to a nice, surprisingly cheap hotel and, after finally taking a decent shower, I threw myself into bed and slept straight to 11:30.  The first thing I did after waking up was call the office and have the travel clerk cancel my train ticket back and get me a ticket on a plane.  Fear of flying cured.

[Gawen]

Fear of flying...

I was never afraid to fly. But one instance got me pretty good. Leaving Chicago (to Detroit) in a DC10. The DC 10 is an early type of jumbo jet. There were less than 10 people flying. It's early evening, the sun still up and this storm blows in. We're sitting on the tarmac waiting our turn. Lightning strikes all around us. It's black outside. Pilot tells us we have to wait not for the storm to pass, but because the airport's radar was hit by lightning. Five minutes or so later the pilot says radar's back on line and we're going. So we took off in this storm.

I have flown a lot, but I have never felt turbulence before or since like that. And I had never seen wings flex...like the plane was flapping to get airborne. Within 5 minutes or so we had flown out of the storm and everything calmed down. It was the quietest and loneliest flight I ever had.

On a flight during the winter from Flint, Michigan to Tampa, Florida, I had to take a twin engine prop job (commonly referred to as a "puddle jumper") to Pittsburgh and then catch a jet to Tampa. We're sitting on the runway while the pilot does her run up and the engines go back to idle. She calls back - the starboard engine has a problem. Oh joy...
A few minutes later after the engines do a couple more run ups she calls back that everything seems fine and we're going. Excuse me....SEEMS fine??? All I could think about was going down into lake Erie which is nothing but 3 feet thick ice. But we made it.

Oh...and I'm sorry Whitney. I didn't know that was you...*chucklin*

[Tank]

Turbulence is fun! But I loath the Airbus automatic pilot that hasn't been trimmed properly! You get this slow figure of 8 roll as the system corrects, then over corrects, then re-corrects, then over corrects again, a slow vomit inducing roll! 

Flying to the US in a 747 I was in the last row on the starbord side right next to the rear exit. I could hear a hissing sound coming from the door. I was bored and had nothing better to do so I took a paper tissue and held it up and moved it around the door seal. Bottom left corner, it gets sucked onto the door frame. Boing jets have a fail safe door design that prevents a door blow out so there wasn't a safety issue. Happy I'd found the problem I sat back down again. A little later the flight engineer came down the aisle looking around. He heard the hissing and did exactly the same thing I did. Smug or what! 

[Gawen]

Smug or what! 

Nah...total class!