With all my time doing presentations at communities on Moscow, St. Petersburg, and most recently Oslo, I wanted to take a trip to Indiana to visit family for the first time since I moved out to Seattle three years ago. But every time I looked at tickets I realized I had interviews, presentations, or other commitments that prevented it. As I sat in the bar at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac), I found something that made me sit back in my chair and think. Every time I’d been at an airport in the past, prior to my flights to Oslo, Helsinki, and on to Moscow, each time I was at the airport, it was an impromptu flight spurred by a death that required I fly to Indiana for the funeral. The airport was never a place that I was in for fun until those flights to Europe or this one I was about to take.

It made me think of those that want to travel, speaking of it as if they’d be on a permanent holiday, or those that are high level executives who travel for work as well as friends of mine who are flight attendants themselves where the airport is their place of work or their “interstate highway”. Travel should be fun and, until this past summer it was not for me, but for people who frequent the airport it may be less fun than you may think, or in some cases a necessary “evil” being constantly on the go, in security, making tight connections, etc. Returning from Europe in May, I even sat next to a retired surgeon who made the transition to full time travel blogger who told me, “it’s great, and I love it but, the deadlines for my articles can be rough and I’m constantly busy,” and then he, like me, had a tough connection to make in Amsterdam and we both had to negotiate with the security monitors to let us go through fast enough to make them.

This trip was the first “fun” trip I’d made to Indiana by air in over twenty years. The previous three flights in that span were each related to a funeral, first my mother in 2003, then my father in 2016, and finally my brother last year. That realization made me marvel at that the airport, in my life, has never been a happy place to enjoy but here I was enjoying the airport and not in a rush to be anywhere.

My upcoming trip in June, back to Europe, will continue to build the positive association with the airport for me but I’m mindful that travel blogging and travel are not always “glitzy” glamour, lollipops, and rainbows, as it is a profession like any other for those that can make a living at it.

Random thoughts while waiting for your flight can sometimes give you inspiration…