off to Arizona. It’s a beautiful place to ride. Unfortunately, there are no motorcycles on the itinerary. I know, it kinda sucks, but we’ve all got to make a living. I was surprised to see on my reservations that I have dropped a status level with the area’s oligopic leader in air travel, but I suppose I should be grateful, since that means I haven’t had to be on a plane as much lately, and the status doesn’t get you shit anyway.
Airline travel is the antithesis of traveling by motorcycle. First of all, they won’t let you pilot the thing. No amount of negotiating is going to make that happen, but it can give the folks at TSA something to do, and you a free stay at the grey bar hotel. So, sit back, close your eyes, and hope that the pilot took a couple bumps to even out those four vodka tonics.
Second, on a bike, even with a group, you don’t really have to put up with people. Sure, there’s a stop here and there that you’d rather skip, or the occasional extra loud radio, but for the most part, there’s sufficient buffer between you and the other people on your journey that you don’t feel the need to throat punch them.
Third, I think we can all agree that taken at its most basic level, a motorcycle is an odd contraption. It’s basically a bicycle, (a contraption in its own right), with an internal combustion engine that the rider straddles and hand and foot controls th
at either make you go faster or keep you from crashing into things. Not really built on the premise of safety. But for god’s sake, at least it’s not a jet propelled tin can with three hundred passengers that flies through the air at five hundred miles an hour. And seriously, why the seatbelts? Like that’s gonna help when I plummet to the ground from 30,000 feet.
Airplanes have one thing going for them: They’re expeditious. And we are an impatient, hurried culture. We will tolerate being told what we can have, how we can carry it, naked body scans, being herded like cattle, and being practically shoe horned into a “seat” all because air travel is fast. Gone are the days of any kind of pleasantries in air travel. The romance, the luxury, the specialness of it all. It’s now commoditized, and you’re just a seat, one more pieces of fleshy cargo that the airline has been contracted to move from point A to B. And they will do so, with a error rate far in excess of FedEx, and with about the same care.
How many things do we do because they’re faster, because they’re easier? And what do we give up? A cookie instead of fruit, McDonalds instead of a meal at home, a pill instead of meditation and reflection, a drink instead of exercise. And today, a plane instead of a bike.