Stjohn's RV-7

Flew to San Francisco for the Green Festival this past weekend. Lots of eco stuff, green building, organic farming, alternative energy, etc. We took Southwest from LAX to SFO. It sucked, both ways. They were the cheap seats, so we sat in the very back near the commode, listening to the turbofans. The seats were crammed about as close together as they could have been. On the evaluation card, I think I mentioned that they should just put us in horizontal racks, since that worked so well for slave ships and gulag trains. Airline fun comes from any direction.. It could be the kid behind you, kicking the seatback, or the businessdrone in front of you who has to lean it into your knees every ten minutes with a full body stretch, or the plumpling next to you, arm-fat oozing into your tiny and expensive space after its conquest of the armrest for the duration of the flight. On the other side of you might be a chatterbox who fails to understand that one person’s way to pass the time is another person’s relativistic dilation of hell. And then there’s the screaming kid, who might be in any one of the above zones, but could come from anywhere, the farther away the better. The inverse-square law IS your friend. We got all this and more, this trip. The sound of the turbofans is kind of cool at first, and does a lot to pave over the other annoyances, but it gets on your nerves after a while and the only way out of that is earplugs. I don’t like earplugs, especially in a tube full of strangers where I might, much as I’d rather not, have to interact with one of them at any time.
Every time one of these little annoyances would crop up, from the security checkpoint to the ass-in-the-face waiting to get off the plane, I thought of my little RV in the garage, and my ride with Dan Checkoway last year in N714D. Motivation comes in many forms. Thanks, Southwest, for strengthening my resolve to press on with my plane so that I can take care of my own regional aviation needs.