Thoughts on Travel

OAFS Photo

Now don't get me wrong, I rather enjoy travel, under certain circumstances. Traveling to go see friends and family? Love it. Traveling for work? Meh. Good thing I don't have to do the latter any more.

I've traveled for some distance¹ by: car, ship/boat, aircraft, bus, and even by train. Being a control freak of sorts, I prefer traveling by car. I'm in charge, I control the vehicle, and I call the shots. Thing is, that can be tiresome over distances which take longer than three hours to traverse.

Traffic, other drivers, the weather, and even the time of year all have an impact on the relative stressfulness of traveling by car. For instance ...

We returned from Maryland on a Sunday, having done that once before in the spring, noting just how little traffic there was. So ...

Of course April is not peak vacation season, June is the start of said season.

Now I'm not saying that all the traffic we encountered on the road were people returning from vacation (or perhaps setting out on vacation), most of the other vehicles had one or two occupants, some looked loaded up for vacation. Most did not.

We're also in the construction season, which closes down roads, makes others almost unusual, and sends people off in directions they perhaps didn't want to go. (Bothe emotionally and physically!)

I did travel by train, once upon a time. I had caught a space available flight from Okinawa to Korea, normally I could get one straight to where I wanted to go, which was Gunsan. On this day, there were (oddly enough) no flights to Gunsan. Hey, it's rare, happened once in my 12 months of shuttling back and forth between Okinawa and Korea.

Source

The green circle is where I wanted to go, the blue circle is where I wound up. Now a fellow serviceman on the aircraft (a first generation Korean-American in the US Navy) said, "Catch a train, it's easy. You do read Korean, right?"

Well, fortunately I did. The guy was also heading to the train station, so I tagged along. Spoke enough of the local lingo to figure out the schedule, had to go through the yellow circle to the green circle. It's where the train went.

Boarded and the train took off like a shot from a cannon, for about ten miles, then it slowed to damned near walking speed. But I eventually got to Daejon, where I discovered that the next train to Gunsan wasn't until the next day, early the next day, but still over twelve hours away.

Being the impatient type, I stepped out of the terminal. There was a gathering of taxi drivers waiting for folks wanting to depart the train station, myself being one. When they saw me they all perked up. One, the best English speaker, asked me where I was headed. When I answered, the drivers had a quick huddle, after which the English speaker informed me which of their number would haul me the fifty miles to Gunsan, and for how much.

It was pricey, but was actually cheaper than a NYC cab from JFK to Park Avenue. (Which may be a story for the future.)

Finally got home after my "big adventure." Well, I thought it was a big adventure, but it came nowhere near my mother-in-law's adventure of flying from Korea to Germany, all by herself and with a limited understanding of English and no knowledge at all of German.

I swear, my late, beloved mother-in-law could do anything she set her mind to and God help you if you got in the way. Woman was determined!

I rather miss her. She passed away less than seven months later, it was sudden and it was a shock, but we did get to see her for a month in Germany.

Anyhoo, more travel tales later, maybe.

It's hot here and I ain't much in the mood to write.

Crabby old man syndrome.

¹ By "some distance" I mean anything taking more than an hour to travel.