The Sean Cruiser

It's not many ways in which I describe myself as 'just like John Madden'. In fact, there may be only one way, and that is our mutual disdain for flying. Our reasoning may be different in that I despise the absolute contempt that the airline industry appears to heap upon its hapless passengers, while John appears to be a big fluffy coward about the whole thing. It's not that I dislike flying only the process in the same way I might say I don't dislike sitting but when you put me in an electric chair ...

This is unfortunate because my wife's parents live 2000 miles away, and she, quite unreasonably I think, likes to see them occasionally. This would be fine were they to always be the ones to fly here to Minnesota, but I recognize their argument that perhaps in the deep dark heart of January, it is not they who should fly to Minnesota but we who should fly to the far warmer gulf coast. These are the moments when I despise reasonable logic.

So deep is my dislike for flying that I would eschew a warm week of southern sun in the middle of a typically sub-arctic Minnesota winter for the six-ten hours in airports with the angry men and women who work there that I would have to endure.

Were that I had a Madden Cruiser, with its flat screen televisions, comfortable accomodations and complete lack of infants suffering from ear pain, then airlines be damned. What we have instead is a Toyota Corolla which is not entirely unlike driving a shoe box around, and an active four year-old who would probably enjoy the idea of riding around in a shoe-box. The thought of cramming ourselves and our belongings into a compact car and spending twenty-four hours both ways driving through the cold of winter to visit my wife's folks is, as it turns out, almost exactly equal in my mind to the unpleasantness of flying.

I don't know why, but I completely lose my cool at airports, and those of you who know me know that I don't exactly have cool in any sense of the word to spare. My wife talks about how difficult it is traveling with a child, which is why she prefers to travel with only our son. She's not wrong. I pace up and down the terminal, glaring at the outbound schedule just waiting for some delay to show up on flights I'm not even on as the impending harbinger of certain travel doom, and when those delays inevitably arrive, oh how I unravel.

I have legitimate reason for this, as we endured what seems like seven trips in a row where at least one flight in the chain was cancelled leading to exhaustive rebooking and overnight stays. And that was before 2001, and the apparent mandate from the airline industry to "make travel as unpleasant as possible."

I may be the first man in history to say this, but I really wish my mother-in-law lived 2000 miles closer.