Travel brings observation and the reflection that comes with observation, and the learning that comes with those observations, all juiced under in the variety of place and movement, and novelty and conversations.
And so travel is an amphitheater of things to write about, in this drip, drip, drip of the mind as vapors cool into colorful liquid drops of flowing ideas.
The last few weeks of career pause blended more Donegal time with Dad with a first visit to Hawaii, touching down in Lihue on the island of Kauai.
Paired with reading some 19th century military history – on the infamous massacre that was the Charge of The Light Brigade – and the shock of waking up on 7 October to learn of a massacre in Israel – these last weeks yanked me into plenty of thought about history’s endless arc of tribes, possession and dispossession, and the primal brutality that can bubble up.
But, let’s start with take-off, to pull you into the magical experience of outbound EI60 Aer Lingus SFO-DUB, on a rare balmy early fall evening.
Just stepping into that green tube of aluminium alloy now brings a warm feeling of familiarity, welcomed through the galley by the verdant charm of the Irish cabin crew, with their mostly Dublin accents.
Ten minutes later, the voice of the Captain comes over the announcement system: “You’re in for one hell of a treat if you’re on the right hand side”, he shared as our rumbling taxiing down the runway U-turned into take-off position.
Over the next seven to eight minutes it was snap, snap, snap as day turned to dusk and turned to darkness.
You get this moment of lift, when the wing tips down and touches a thermal, bouncing the vast flying tube of aluminium alloy into an arcing bend. Sharing a few photos below of what unfolded as we looked down on South San Francisco, straightened out over my other spiritual home of Ocean Beach, with a wonderful view too of Golden Gate Park (larger than New York’s Central Park, did you know..?). And then that wing dip as we cut a saluting turn over ‘Her Majesty’ (as I call ‘her’…) the Golden Gate Bridge with a view spanning east out to the city and the Salesforce Tower winking in the setting sun.
It’s amazing that we have flight at all. It’s amazing how cheap it is (think about this, if you disagree). It’s amazing that you get a hot meal, and there are toilets up there. And it’s amazing that in the passage of churning through the first 100 pages of a new book, falling on the floor once as I jerked myself out of sleep, we land in a whole new quilt of colours and light, in the next day…
