Christmas often involves travel - and that's true of many seasonal movies, too

If you have to fly in December, you might as well fly a biplane.

Christmas travel and I are old friends.

From the time I went to university, until the time I graduated, every Christmas would involve travelling from UNB in Fredericton, New Brunswick, home to Toronto, then back again two weeks later.

That didn't change a whole lot when I graduated and moved out west to Alberta. Every other year, I'd fly home to Toronto to spend time with family. When I moved to Fort St. John, B.C. that continued, in fact, it increased. It seemed every third year I'd go to Fort Nelson to visit Ann's family, followed the next year by a Toronto trip, then one year at home.

I'm really glad I don't travel too much at Christmas, any more. The last time I went anywhere in December was 2004, when I spent a wonderful week in the Titusville area, paddling among alligators, riding in bi-planes, visiting the Kennedy Space Centre and birding.

I love spending Christmas at home with my human-parrot flock (Ann, Coco, Einstein, until this year, Nikki, and now newcomer Congo).

I really enjoy watching many of the Christmas movies that come out every year. It dawned on me just recently that many of them involve travel - including five of my favourites.

Here they are in a countdown...

5.  It's a Wonderful Life. At first glance you might say, "Where's the travel?" It's hinted at, more than actually done. Jimmy Stewart's "George Bailey" wants to travel, buys a big suitcase to go - but can never leave, because of family commitments coming up every time he's about to catch a train. His honeymoon  is spent in a rundown house festooned with travel posters. And then there's those classic quotes: "Do you know the three most exciting sounds in the world? ... Anchor chains, plane motors, and train whistles," and, "I'm gonna see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Colosseum." So yeah, there is a strong element of travel in the story.

George Bailey would've used a suitcase like this. (morguefile.com)

4. Christmas in Connecticut. A romantic comedy featuring Barbara Stanwyck as a magazine food columnist who is not what she appears to be. It revolves around a trip from New York to Connecticut to convince the publisher she is a married woman on a farm - not a writer in Manhattan. Lots of gags and funny lines, great watch for couples and families.

3. Christmas with the Kranks. A daughter travelling to South America (then back), a Christmas cruise - it has travel written all over it. Hilarious physical comedy scenes with Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis (especially the restaurant scene!), and Dan Akroyd as well as some very heart-warming moments make it a funny flick as well as good holiday fare. Good fun for all.

2. Home Alone/Home Alone 2. A trip to Paris. A trip to Florida. A trip to New York. Yeah, it's all based around holiday travel. But that's not why I watch them yearly. It's the incredible physical comedy by Macaulay Culkin, Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci, reminiscent of the Three Stooges shorts. Some great supporting actors pitch in, as well, like John Candy and Tim Curry. And when you watch it, don't forget to order the cheese pizza...

And the Number 1 Christmas movie that involves travel is...

1. A Christmas Carol (1951). There are at least 15 different movie versions of this Dickens story, and that's not counting cartoons or those flicks based loosely on this story. The Alister Sims version is the best in my opinion.
While the travel consists mainly of visiting locations in England, it ALSO involves time travel, back into the past as well as into the future.
And that would make it "king" in terms of travel in any Christmas movie.

Merry Christmas!



Who can forget some of the classic airport scenes in Home Alone and Home Alone 2?

Commercial flying: changes for the better - or worse? Your call...

Where's the flight crew? Where are my peanuts?
(Photo by http://smg.photobucket.com/user/Thud/profile/)

I remember the first time I flew in a plane.

I was 17 at the time, and it was not a large commercial jet liner I'd climbed into. It was a Turbo Beaver, a six-seat bush plane, often used for fighting forest fires, one that took from from water, not a runway Makes sense. I was in the bush, working as a junior forest ranger in Gogama, Ontario for the summer, and as a treat, they took us up for rides in a Turbo Beaver.

It was quite a ride - even after some of us were "water-bombed" during one of the takeoffs from Lake Minisinakwa (hey, it was used for fighting fires, remember?)

To quote from my (very first "travel") journal:

"In every direction we looked, nothing met our eyes but lakes and forests. It was far out!"

Actually, that was not the first time I'd flown; it was the first time I remember flying. Apparently in moving from Ottawa to Winnipeg when I was two years old, our family flew. But, of course, I don't remember that flight.

Fast forward two years from my junior forest ranger days, and I'm climbing onto an Air Canada jet in Fredericton, New Brunswick. I've just finished my first term at the University of New Brunswick, and I was flying home to Toronto for Christmas.

That became a familiar routine over the next several years, and the pattern continued, although not as often, when I graduated and moved out west.

But flying really became part of my life when I started working as a travel writer. There's no getting around. It's part of the job.

Since then, I've pretty much seen the "best of times, and the worst of times" with respect to the different airlines and the services they offer travellers.

Some of the best airlines I've flown on include Cathay Pacific (to Thailand via Hong Kong), Eva Air (to Malaysia via Taipei) and British Airways (to Africa via London). I won't get into a list of my worst flying experiences here (that's a story for another time, perhaps); but, suffice it to say, I have experienced my share of missing luggage, broken baggage, and connection SNAFUS (I remember running through the Orly Airport in Paris trying to make a connection once - I kept waiting for the Home Alone music to start playing).

When I began flying regularly in my university days, in-flight meals were almost guaranteed for any flight longer than two hours. We all know that's not the case, these days, when you're lucky to get free pretzels or cookies. But now we also have to pay for checking baggage, for not checking baggage, to get a blanket or pillow - the things we always used to take for granted.

Mind you, we do have state-of-the-art technology to get us from Point A to Point B these days; however, I sure would have liked to experience flying in the so-called Golden Age of Flying.

Or at least, I'd like to have experienced it the way it was portrayed in movies like Back from Eternity or Five Came Back and on TV shows like Pan Am.

Economy airlines are the norm, these days. (John Geary clip)

Having experienced major muscle cramps and knots after flying economy class halfway across the Western Hemisphere, I certainly like the idea of wider seats with more leg room. And the idea of large lounges or stand-up bars in plane also appeals to me. (India's Kingfisher Airlines did have stand-up bars in some of its planes - what would you expect from an airline owned by a brewery? - but that didn't save it from bankruptcy.)

As well, I think the idea of flying on a plane with curtained berths for sleeping at night would be cool.

And back then, there was virtually no security like we have to go through today to board a plane.

I think flying in a large flying boat (think, Indiana Jones) would be a great experience to enjoy, at least once, anyway.

However, flying back then may not have been all it was cracked up to be. There is a certain romance associated with flying in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s that all nostalgia tends to stimulate - and like most nostalgia, perhaps colours the situation a bit more favourably than how it really was.

Who wouldn't be enticed to fly south
by this poster?

While paying baggage fees and having to purchase mostly bad meals may be a pain-in-the-butt, and lining up for security checkpoints is tedious and tiring, there are many things we do not have to put up with these days:

• Smoking. It used to be common, more people smoked, and not just cigarettes - cigars and pipes were not uncommon. Welcome to the Smoky Skies. 
• Lack of entertainment. We have music, movies, and on some airlines, singing flight attendants. Back in the day, you could write postcards. By hand. Then post them when you landed.
• Drunks. Back in the day, booze was mostly free. Knock yourself (and many did). But boozy seat-mates are not always the best of company. (To be fair, on the Asian-based airlines I've used, it's still free. "Erica, just give me two cokes and four of those mini-bottles of rum, please!" But of course, Yours Truly is a pleasant drunk...)
• Really expensive flights. During the Golden Age, only the really well-off could fly. 
• Danger. While several high-profile crashes have been in the news these days, it's still much safer to fly now than it was 50 years ago, when the chance of crashing was five times greater than it is today.

The list goes on; more details are provided in a 2013 Fast Company article.

The more I think about, the more I think I'll put up with some of the negatives we have on today's commercial flights. (Either that, or finally break down and fly first class - just once! - to see how the other half lives.)

In the meantime...

Pass the pretzels, please.

Making like Snoopy in a biplane of my own

Wandering around on Facebook the other day, I noticed one of my friends posted something about the Abbotsford (B.C.) air show, which takes place every August. For some reason, it piqued my memory about the time I made like Snoopy, the World War I flying ace. (No, not the video game - the "REAL" WWI flying ace, as read in Peanuts comics or seen on "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" animated Halloween special.)

Really. I lived my "Snoopy" fantasy not in a video game, but in real life.

Well, sort of ...

I was on a group tour of the Valiant Air Command Warbird Air Museum, (which, by the way, is hosting its own 2012 airshow, starting March 9), located near Titusville, Florida. We'd spent the previous day on the water, paddling down the Econ River. This day, we were focused on the air. While waiting for the tour to begin, I noticed an open cockpit biplane sitting on the tarmac outside the museum. Then I noticed a sign offering rides in the plane. 

 

Stearman biplane - my transport for the day.

While not exactly a WWI plane - it was a 1930's Stearman biplane, used to train American combat pilots between the two world wars - it was close enough for me.

The flights are not included as part of the museum tour; it is run by Warbird Flights and it is booked separately. And in this instance, it was not part of our scheduled tour. But I quickly convinced our tour leader to let me "play hooky" and trade some ground time for some time in the air.

I quickly made my arrangements, then began my wait. And wait...and wait...I thought, "I'll never get out of Casablanca..." Oops! Sorry! There's another one of those "Casablanca flashes" I get from time to time (well, it is the 70th anniversary, after all...)

Eventually, the wait ended. As we rose up into the air off the tarmac, I finally caught my breath – we were airborne! Now I could actually relax and enjoy the experience of the wind rushing past me in the open cockpit of the Stearman.

Exhilaration quickly replaced my nervousness about taking my first flight in a open cockpit airplane. While the worst part of the trip was waiting around the hangar to go up, the actual flying itself was much too invigorating to waste any time worrying – even when the pilot asked me if I wanted to take over and "drive" for a while.

If you're in the Titusville, Florida area March 9-12, 2012,

you might want to check out the air show.

I tentatively took the control stick and followed his instructions to keep the top of the fuselage level with the horizon. I was only "driving" for a few minutes, but during that few minutes, I gained a very healthy respect for "fly boys" who piloted these kinds of planes. It took incredible concentration on my part just to keep the plane level. And I didn't have to worry about fuel, air speed, communicating with air traffic control towers or any of the other myriad thoughts that occupy pilots in the air.

During the 20-minute flight, we did not spy any red Fokker triplanes; however, the thrill of playing "Snoopy, the World War I Flying Ace" in search of his nemesis, the Red Baron, was too much. When we found a boat on the river far below that wanted to play "tag" with us as we banked back and forth above it, I couldn’t resist parroting Snoopy, by shouting, "Curse you, Red Baron!" just once.

View from the cockpit.



The museum itself occupies 10 acres of property at the Space Center Executive Airport in Titusville. It displays, maintains and restores all types of aircraft that were indigenous to the world's military air forces going all the way back to WWI and covering present-day aircraft.

The main display area is approximately 30,000 square feet in size and is wide and high enough to accommodate the wingspan and tail assembly of all but the largest bombers.

In addition to the main hangar bay, an area of 15,000 square feet is dedicated to the display of memorabilia associated with the "Valiant" individuals who flew and maintained these aircraft.

If you really want to experience living flying, though, combining the tour with a flight makes for a much better experience than just a tour alone...

Even if you don't spot the Red Baron...