Since I will be traveling
tomorrow I decided that today I would write about my first time trip that
consisted of me flying for the first time.
I was in third grade so I am guessing that I was about eight years old
and my family decided that we would travel to Florida to visit Walt Disney
World. Usually we would take the trailer
pop up tent to some camp ground somewhere along the upper east coast, but that
Easter break my mom thought it would be great to go to Disney World and dad
reluctantly agreed.
First thing that I
remembered was my mom coming into my classroom to take me out early. I must have been the last to be picked up
since my brother and sister were already in the old white station wagon as well
as our luggage.
Being that this memory is
well over thirty years old, it is totally understood that there is much that I
don’t remember. So this is going to be
like Swiss cheese, with lots of missing spots.
The next thing I remember is being at Newark Airport and looking out the
large window at the planes lined up. I
can remember my brother bouncing all over the place and how excited he was, and
then I remember waking up at the Howard Johnson’s motel the next morning. The reason for the huge gap in that memory
was the fact that I fell asleep in the chair at the airport and didn’t even wake
up until the next morning. For years I have
been told how great it was that I slept the whole time and how worried my parents
were about the air pressure and my ears.
There are only a couple of
memories of being there that I remember and that is an elephant ride and the smell
of rental car and swimming at the pool of the motel. I know you would figure that something in Walt
Disney would stand out in my mind more, but honestly the most important thing I
remember was a sense of pure peace. Being
that there really weren’t that many times in my life that gave me that sort of feeling
it was a big enough deal to stand out in my mind. I remember sitting by the pooh with an orange juice
in a container that looked like an orange and watching as my family swam around
in the pool with smiles.
As I search my brain right
now, I believe it was the only time in my early life that everyone had a true smile
on their face at the same time. It ended
as soon as we entered the airport in Florida and it never returned. I remember asking my parents if we could go back
many times and I know that they thought I loved the theme park so much that I felt
as though we had to go back, but what they didn’t know was that I wanted to feel
at peace again.
On the return flight I did
the same as I did on the way out there, so I have no memory at all of flying or
the excitement my brother experienced.
Funny thing is that when I
visited my mother for the first time when she moved to Florida she made sure that
me and my four year old son spent a day at Disney. That feeling was not there and in fact it was so
stressful that I could not even enjoy watching my son at his first experience of
that park. I guess too many years and too
many differences had crept in between my mother and me to have that feeling again.
I am just thankful that my son had no idea
the amount of strain between my mother and me.
