I’m a travelling man, run away if you can. Cruel world keeps turning, I’m dead on my feet

(Wow - 2 posts in one day - look at me!)

I am right now angry. Angry over the price of flying these days.

I started in 1998 learning that travel was fun. I flew to Edmonton, Canada to see the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. It wasn’t the first time I flew by far (I actually had flown a good bit for my company between 1997 & 2000 when I was on the Diversity Council) but it was one of the first times I’d flown for fun. I have now gone to all but one of the Edmonton Folk Music Festivals since that time, and loved it.

I should clarify that statement. Flying doesn’t bother me like it bothers other people. I don’t love the food, the other people, the takeoffs, the flying in bad weather, the crying babies, the airports, the layovers, the bad movies, the boredom on hour 8 of a flight or the class separation between the haves (First Class) and the have-nots (The Cattlecall.) (And I have been I First Class twice and wasn’t happy with it – I am too much of the blue collar/steel mill worker’s son to enjoy the closed curtain and wine choice. It is only the illusion that you are better than the other person.) But what I do love is being somewhere completely different in a few hours that you just can’t simply drive there.

I remember standing in front of the Reichstag, the German legislative building in Berlin, just past the Brandenburg Gate after touching the Berlin Wall (which is now the largest outdoor art gallery), on my first trip overseas just being overwhelmed. As new as most of Berlin is due to the war, it is the older things that impressed me.

I remember standing across the Thames from Parliament when Big Ben started chiming in, while eating fish & chips out of a newspaper. I was startled at first, as I had kind of forgotten that it was right next to Parliament, but then smiled my greasy smile.

I remember walking across the Bridge over the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. It was one of those moments where everything made sense about travel. I had just petted an elephant, I had drank a beer in a café when Eltee had asked if I wanted to walk across the bridge. Even though I knew where I was, it seemed unreal to me in thought and yet there I was, walking across it.

I remember going up the glass elevator in the middle of the Eiffel Tower with my niece, and she realized half-way up that she was very afraid of heights, and when we got to the top she didn’t want to walk the last 7 or 8 steps to get the open air observation deck on top of the tower (there is a glassed in observation tower under the very top of the Eiffel Tower.) I looked at her and said “Jessie, you don’t want to tell people that you went 4,000 miles to Paris and then you wouldn’t walk the final 10 feet to the top of the Eiffel Tower.” She made it to the top. And then she walked right back down.

And I remember bringing her brother, my nephew, to Paris last year, 3 years after she went. I remember walking down the Champs-Élysées with him, eating frozen chocolate gelatin on a picture perfect day, just feeling lucky that I was able to share this with him.

I am sad today because prices for flights have skyrocketed (pun intended) and it is making our world bigger instead of smaller. I have been looking for flights from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, & out of Dulles Washington DC to Amsterdam, and I have yet to find a flight less than $800.00, and actually most flights are around $1,000.00. It isn’t that I am either cheap or poor, but there is no reason to spend a grand trying to get to a destination, especially when you are flexible. For one weeks flight time.

I have spread my search over about 3 week time frame, and nothing. I understand some increase, but it has increased at phenomenal rate. I look for other destinations, London, Paris, and they are all over $900.00. I’ve gone for far less than this amount in the past, and not like that distant past. More recently.

This rate increase is going to make it almost impossible to see some of the greatest places in the world. And my nieces and nephews won’t be able to see many of these sights, and that angers me. It makes our world bigger and scarier. I understand a lot more about the world just from traveling, and they won’t have the resources to be able to travel very far.

I think many of the greatest joys in my life have come from the wonders of travel, of seeing things that I can’t see out my back door, of meeting people you can’t meet at your local grocery, and at being in situations you can’t get in your home town.

I will still be able to travel because I am single and have expendable income. But what about families with younger children who want those children to experience everything this world has to offer? They won’t be able to afford it. And that is a shame, almost criminal.