Flying The Friendly Skies

I would have to say that my least favorite mode of transportation is flying.  It’s not so much that I have a fear of flying as much as a concern about falling.  To be fair, I have never taken a cruise, I have only traveled once by train but I have spent a good deal of time on a bus.  When I was going to school out East I became quite familiar with the Greyhound bus route as well as the stations where I would spend time waiting for the next bus.  It took about 36 hours to travel from my home in Wisconsin to New Jersey.  The first trip was filled with equal parts excitement because I was going to grad school to pursue my Masters Degree and apprehension for the number of hours it would take.  All in all it’s not the worst way to travel, particularly if you’re not in any hurry.

This brings me back to flying.  While it is much quicker to get from here to there in an airplane the accommodations are not all that different from a bus.  Unless you are traveling first class, the space between you and the other passengers is minimal and leg room is even worse on a plane.  The rest rooms seem about the same from what I recall, but you don’t have quite the same turbulence on a bus that you experience in the air.  If your flight is long enough you may get a beverage and perhaps even a bag of pretzels  (Gone are the days of peanuts).  I do recall that there was a dining car on the train, but I did not partake of it’s culinary offerings.

The mode of travel that Five By Design uses most often is a fifteen passenger van and a twenty-four foot box truck.  Because we generally travel with all of our shows at one time, two of our members are almost always on the road in the truck.  The rest of us ride in the van which I may have mentioned in an earlier blog I usually drive.  I figure I have logged close to 400,000 miles since I joined the group 17 years ago.  I have seen many parts of the country multiple times (some I really only needed to see once) and have driven through every state in the lower 48.  It was never a goal I had set for myself, it simply happened to work out that way.  It isn’t even that I love driving so much.  To be honest, my reason for spending all that time behind the wheel is that it’s the most comfortable seat in the van.  The bench seats don’t offer much in the line of support and the passenger front seat does not have a lot of leg room.

All that being said, I still enjoy traveling by ground better than flying.  I like the convenience of getting there quicker, but I think too much of our lives today is about convenience.  Driving does allow us more opportunities to stop and smell the roses along the way, although anyone who has ever traveled with us will testify that I am not a champion of stopping once we start rolling down the road.  I like to get where we’re going so you might think I would choose flying over driving, but I still want the option open to me to stop along the way.  My primary reason for not stopping when Five By Design is on the road is that I prefer driving during the daylight.  If you want to see the country you’re traveling through it’s a lot easier to do so while the sun is up.

I think I have rattled on long enough about this particular aspect of Five By Design long enough.  We just flew in yesterday from a successful guest appearance with the Wheeling Symphony on Friday, April 18th where we had the opportunity to share the stage with Peter Marshall, former host of Hollywood Squares and a fine singer as well.  We now look forward to four more shows in the next eight days stretching from Kalamazoo, MI to Johnstown, PA to Harrisburg, PA and then home for a few days before heading off to Regina,Canada and Colorado Springs.  We’ll see a lot of the country over the next couple of weeks, but at least we’ll be seeing it from the ground.  And for my tastes, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Terrence Niska