Travelogue England April-May 2023: Adventure

How to begin to talk of our adventure? Perhaps by explaining why it seemed like such an adventure.

On April 22, 2023 we flew from Orlando International Airport in Florida. Why not Jacksonville? Well, as of yet there are no direct flights to England from Jacksonville. One has to go through other major airports to find one. Orlando is only a few hours drive from us, so it seemed more practical to book there. The point was, to spend as little time on the plane as possible, and to have that time be spent in relative comfort.

You have to realize, we are not usually plane travelers. My husband did, for a short time, have a job that required frequent flying and he developed a routine to prepare for the event and learned to pack only what was necessary. For me it was very new. Other than visiting my siblings occasionally—that is, rarely—I almost never get on a plane. And there is a good reason.

My earliest plane trip was on Lufthansa in 1970. We were taking the $5 a Day ( a popular guidebook of the time) trip with my parents, brother and sister around continental Europe, in the back of a brand new Wolfsburg edition, orange-red Volkswagen Squareback. We went to various spots in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and France. I was in fourth grade and remember very little except the matching dresses my sister and I wore, and huge slugs and my brother discovering hair in the bottom of his orange drink outside the ruins of Pompeii. All I remember about the flight was stopping in Iceland to get scratchy mittens.

My first plane flight alone was to Germany from Minneapolis, when I was a high school student. I landed in Frankfurt and was picked up by my host family at the airport. I spent four weeks there in the vicinity of Aschaffenburg, and am eternally indebted to my host family’s generosity, sharing their home with a fifteen-year-old who couldn’t speak much German. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my German teacher at junior high, and my piano teacher, who remains a good friend, for helping convince my parents to let me go.

My second flight was to Minnesota to visit a friend, late in high school.

The next flight was at the end of college, with a new passport (I dont know if kids needed passports back in 1970.) I was lucky enough to win a scholarship from the German-American Friendship Clubs, an association of German and American women associated with American military bases in Germany. My German professor alerted me to the scholarship when I had one foot out the door of college, Gottseidank! (Thank God!) I got to spend ten whole months in Wuerzburg, Germany (then West Germany.) That was a life-changing experience, and although I don’t know that I was the perfect ambassador for my country, I certainly valued the trip and the many new faces and aspects of life that it introduced me to. Again, my host family provided me with a home base and a place to go to, during long holiday breaks. My wonderful friends were my tour guides and interpreters, as well as language instructors.

I was certain, that I would be back before long.

It has been nearly forty years.

After Germany, I went to law school, yearning all the time to return, but I stuck it out and graduated, with middling grades, which is nothing to be ashamed of, in law school. Soon I was working in South Florida, first in collections law and then in child support enforcement.

I got married along the way to my dear husband, who had stuck with me through Germany and through the many irritabilities of law school, just as he had previously, through most of my undergrad years. He had even visited me for a week while I was in Germany. That’s when I knew for sure he was a keeper.

Lo and behold, when my daughter arrived, and I was on paid maternity leave (unheard of in those days, many thanks to my firm!) the partners of the law firm split up and went their separate ways. Suddenly, I had no job to go back to. Luckily, I had no desire to go back anyway, once I had my little one. I liked the experience of having a child so much, that I did it three more times before calling it quits.

The four children were probably another reason, why I didn’t fly so much in the next twenty years. I remember going to the Boston area for my sister’s wedding, a baby girl in my arms and a squirmy toddler girl beside me. I remember heading from Florida to San Fransisco for my brother’s wedding, on a flight just a few months after my first son was born. I remember anxiously trying to find a comfortable and not too showy way of breastfeeding in the coach section of the plane, where seats were three-across.

My husband must have kept the other two in check, because I don’t recall tending to them on the plane at all. I so desperately didn’t want to be the one with the crying baby on the flight! I remember a woman sitting next to me, who was on her first flight away from her young child. Despite the stress of my present moment, I think I felt more sorry for her!

After that flight, another child was born, my second son, the youngest. He never got the chance to go on a plane with me. We never even took him to Disney World! We only drove places, at that point. More frequently, we let people come to us. It may have been selfish, but to us, it felt like survival. As my life became more and more home-centered, we let others do the traveling.

We did have a few trips here and there to see my brother or sister, just me and one girl, once the youngest was weaned. But after three of those, we stopped. School made travel harder, and long trips in the van replaced short hops on a plane. Kids had their own destinations, usually closer, although across town, and that was enough travel for us.

We visited the grandparents on holidays and broke down in the car a few times going across the state, but most of our time was filled with kids activities and my husband’s work.

It wasn’t until my mother started to decline and passed away and my father had his own troubles a year later, that I set foot on a plane again, to go watch by his bedside and tag team with my siblings, to help him through his hard-won though short-lived recovery.

The next trip to see my dad was in a car. After a few of those, there was no longer any reason to come back. After a brief period of feeling better, he passed away, as well. So I took the plane to join my sister in her grief and make arrangements with her and my brother, who had flown in too. Then we all convened once more back in Florida, for our own remembrance ceremony near our family home.

I have been on a plane since then only twice, once to say goodbye to my parents’ memory, and once, just to see my siblings. But never out of the country. Not in forty years. Never anywhere, that required a passport.

I, who used to be the most well-traveled person in my family, if you counted up the number of days. And that includes the travels of my mother, who was for a long time a travel agent.

So, getting on a plane in Orlando, to cross the Atlantic to England was a big deal for me. After many years of COVID and working on my father’s estate, my house steeped in sadness, surrounded by boxes of memories, this felt like a exciting new beginning. My dreams felt like they were about to take flight.

More about that flight in my next installment.

Copyright 2023 Andrea LeDew

For a flight you wouldn’t want to be on, read To the Enablers (Flight 93).