Relearning travel

It’s been two full years since we had not traveled by air, after quietly following the pandemic rules and putting our lives on hold, in a sort of hibernation from leisure and adrenaline rush. This time, our first destination was Hawaii’s big island, a first for us, since we only had visited Maui, several years ago. 

While travel was already not fun back in 2019, adding Covid-19 rules to the equation made it even more awkward and even much harder to handle. Added new rules and forgotten old ones made for a complicated and bitter cocktail that got mixed up with the unpleasant symptoms of accelerated aging. 

Not just that, but since we flew on Southwest, with its quirky systems and procedures, we felt, at times, completely lost. This said, flying back and forth over the Pacific for at least five or six hours was a nice reminder of my first trip over that particular part of the world just fifty years ago. 

In fact, the huge expanse of water under the plane, the uniformity of things to see out of the window except for the ever changing cloud formations hadn’t changed, and that in many ways, was greatly reassuring.

No, I couldn’t see the Pacific’s Eastern garbage patch, but just catch a glimpse of a huge container ship crawling below. More seriously, this was just going from point A to point B and returning to A, with plenty of wild adventures in between, but we were glad that we finally broke the spell and did it!