Traveling is Good

Ahhh, the 4^th, the 4^th. Thinking back, on July 4^th, 1955, we had been married for two days, and we were now aboard a flight on an airline now extinct. I thought it was World Airways, but I can no longer find a reference to such a name. At any rate, it was a prop passenger plane that flew us from LaGuardia Airport in New York to San Francisco in 14 hours. I think it stopped 6 times. We left New York around Midnight, arriving in San Francisco in midafternoon. Say 1-2 PM California time.  Ah, those were the days.  There were of course no jet planes in that era. So most flights were longish.  This flight was Carol and my first time aboard an airline. Oh I had traveled from coast to coast several times.  For my first, I took a Greyhound bus that took me 4 days. But I traveled several times thereafter. But we students devised a slightly different method of traveling from coast to coast. We would find someone who wanted a car driven across the country. Sometimes it was another student who wanted some help driving and we would drive with two people in the front seats and one snoozing on the back seat. Once, we drove the whole way (3000 odd miles) in 79 hours.

So that plane trip was a bit of a stunner. Imagine being aboard a vehicle that left the ground and moved in the open air.  Wow, what a concept.  But just when you imagine that a 14 hour flight was really long, I have to remember our flight from LA to Sydney in 2001, which was just over 15 hours, not counting the six hours it took to get to LA from the East Coast.

Oh, traveling has been such fun.  And I need to remember my childhood, where, until I was 18, I had never traveled more than about ten miles from my home base in New York City.  We didn’t even own a car, nor did so many of our New York City counterparts.  Who needed a car when you never went anywhere beyond a couple of miles away from home base, and buses and subways were so readily available? Our standard Sunday afternoon travels were a subway from Second Avenue Manhattan to Jerome Avenue, the Bronx.  Cars?? I think not.

But that flight with the two of us from LaGuardia to San Francisco began our life pattern of serious traveling by car, plane or train.  I am always a bit surprised at how we turned into world travelers, given our stunted early travel days, where neither of us had ever traveled more than maybe ten miles from our home base.

At the end of our first year of marriage, we were faced with the chore of moving to the LA region, since my first job out of Stanford was as a flight test engineer with the Firestone Guided Missile Division in downtown LA. We moved to Garden Grove, a little place 26 miles away from my work in LA.  And during that first year, we didn’t move about much, as we explored the smoggy world of the LA region. Oddly, we lived there six months before we discovered that, when the smog cleared a bit, you could actually see mountains.  I think that might be when we decided that perhaps the LA region was not really where we would choose to work and play for our new married lives.  And so we moved back up to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I began working with Lockheed on the Polaris missile.

Now there, we had some family. My mom lived there and my sis and her family.  So, we only traveled a bit in California, mainly to places like Lake Tahoe. But then, after six years at Lockheed, I joined a consulting firm doing planning work for the Air Force to help plan and control the development of the Minuteman Missile. In that job I traveled extensively, while my wife and kids enjoyed life in downtown San Francisco. So, I got to see much of the country, while my family stayed home. But then my boss called to ask me whether I would be interested in moving to a new gig in New Delhi, India. We had just received a contract to send four consultants to India, to work with the Planning Commission on planning new large public sector projects. I asked my wife and she said, “sure, why not?”

And so our serious traveling began in earnest. Through that opening, we traveled to India, but it was as though the world of global travel was now open. We visited over 30 countries. After we returned four years later, we traveled more about America.

And so what, right? Well, one of the things we have learned with all this traveling, is that folks are different everywhere you go, but also, they are the same. Human beings react in similar ways. Whether you are white or black, or any of the other colors we humans don, we remain humans. Depending on how we are raised and with whom we interact, we may react to stimuli differently. I guess that’s how racists arrive at that dreadful status. But not everyone is a racist as it turns out.  We all need certain stimuli, we all need to eat and we all need to consume water. We also, all need love and friendship. It all depends on what we focus on and when that determines how we look to other folks.  But key here is that the people who live in China, or Bolivia, or Thailand or Wyoming all have similar needs. Arguably, they could all be great friends, if they would only let that happen.

So try folks. Try love before hate. It works better for all of us.