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Aug. 8, 2005 Show of hands…How many people have never been on an airplane? I recently took my first flight at age forty-one. I really had to psych myself up for it because I have seen way too many reports of landings without permission shall we say. My husband who was also flying for the first time had no such reservations and used every opportunity to give me the willies! If the flaps moved, for example, he declared the wings were falling off. The turbulence lent credence to his declarations. I knew what he was doing, but he was having fun so I figured, why not let him go on with it? He pulled everything but the infamous quote from The Twilight Zone about the man on the wing. Once he settled down however, I decided to take a chance and look out of the window. I was astonished. It was like playing What Shape Is That Cloud? Like I did when I was a kid, only I wasn’t looking up, and they were a LOT closer. It was a more bright white than it is from the ground- the sun is reflecting from the top rather than the underside of the clouds. At first it looked like we were coming out of a bag of cotton balls and we would be able to walk right across the tops without falling through. In places, where there were glimpses of blue, it looked like a peaceful island in the middle of the bluest ocean you could ever see, with white-capped waves rolling to the shore. I could almost picture a surfer crying, “Hang ten!” as he rose to a stand on his board. There was a fabulous waterfall splashing majestically into the waters. I could see me in a hut watching that waterfall every day. It did a lot for calming any fears I had. I knew what Heaven must be like at that moment. Where we went over a storm front, I saw a volcano erupting, with lava spewing high into the air and flowing violently down the sides. There were red reflections of the sun over darker, rain-laden clouds that gave it the effect. We bounced and jostled about for a while, but we stayed in the air and there were no calamities. It was as close as I ever want to come to a real volcano! We were on our way to Orlando and as it happened there were storms over Orlando, so we ended up circling central Florida for over half an hour. We didn’t realize this was happening until my husband noticed he kept seeing coast line at different angles and we finally figured out it was the Atlantic Ocean for a while then the Gulf of Mexico. I had no idea we had to cut such a large circle.
Taking off wasn’t too bad, the flight either, but landing was rough. I went deaf for several minutes on decent, and I was nauseous, but I survived the flight.
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