There are a number of things that have kept me from being a much more of a homebody than a rolling stone. Being an artist means being short on time and money, so I’ve got to be somewhat careful with both. I also tend to find plenty of adventures locally – an active imagination means rarely getting bored with my surroundings. Despite growing up watching lots of nature shows, I only recently made the epiphany that I could actually visit places like the ones on television. Maybe given the delicate state of our environment, those biomes may be much better off without me tramping around on them anyway.
But perhaps the biggest and only true reason my vacations are always ‘staycations’, is that I suffer from choice paralysis. I sometimes ask myself, “If I could travel anywhere in the world, where would I go?” It’s completely daunting for me to pick one spot, even if it could lead to being the first of many. My answer tends to be somewhere as far away and as different as the places I’m accustomed to – like New Zealand, or Tokyo – therefore my choices tend to be cost-prohibitive. Besides, I have a difficult time picturing myself in these faraway places without my bike. All this leads to me not getting around to getting my passport.
I do very much enjoy the company and conversations of travelers: I often ask them what they think of New England, and in their response I gain an understanding of what things are like in their part of the world. Perhaps it’s one of the reason’s I enjoy science fiction – writing about people who aren’t from Earth forces the writer to come up with ideas about what makes Earthlings unique. Maybe one of the most important lessons learned from visiting other places is to understand what makes home special.
Up, Up and Away
In the winter of 2008, I was invited by a friend to take a trip to the Owls Head Transportation Museum in my home state of Maine, by way of his Grumman Tiger four-seater single prop airplane. We took off from Lawrence Municipal Airport. It was an amazing experience. There were four of us, the pilot friend and three passengers, and since we made a stop in Portsmouth New Hampshire for supper at the Friendly Toast, we each had a turn in the front seat, which means the co-pilot’s seat – with all the controls right in front of you. At some point in each of our turns we all got to take the controls and steer the plane a little.
A life-altering moment in the Grumman Tiger on our way to the Friendly Toast, somewhere over Newburyport.
When you fly a real airplane, you have an overwhelming compulsion to absolutely refrain from messing around. While there’s nothing to hit when you’re at 4,500 feet, the sense of survival for you and your dear friends is foremost and prominent in your mind, and a gentle climb or a little bit of a bank is more than enough enticement. It was then I learned about the rudder pedals, which control the ‘yaw’. Imagine being in a tiny room with three of your friends, and with the push of your feet you controlled how much the room wiggled back and forth. It was a blend of uneasiness and thrill in equal parts that I will never forget.
I very much enjoyed the flight to Owls Head. I didn’t realize how profound the experience was, as it led me to some life-choices that some may consider a waste of time, and others may consider it a clever way to experience travel.
A True Flight of Fancy
In 2016 I still was thinking about the flight of the Grumman, and I thought it may be fun to try my hand a flying, but without the risk of physical or property damage, and without the costly lessons that I could never afford. Turns out my computer had enough horsepower to run Microsoft Flight Simulator X, a simulation that was released in 2006, but recently updated to run on more ‘modern’ computers. After trying to fly the starter lessons I realized why real pilots don’t fly with a keyboard and mouse. I decided to make it easier for myself and got a HOTAS system – the cheapest one that worked. ‘Thustmaster’ would be very low on the list of names I’d pick if I were making this product, but it did allow me to fly planes from the hammock I set up in my living room, with a projector screen.
Raise your hand if you have also flown to Armenia in a hammock!
The graphics were good enough for me to meet halfway with my imagination, and after some practice I was enjoying taking off from Logan Airport in my Ultralight trike to gaze down upon a rather rough approximation of the Greater Boston Area.
Even with the removal of the cost barrier, I still suffered from choice paralysis. The whole world is a big place to choose from, and it seemed almost like cheating to start somewhere random and start traveling. After all, this was a simulation about transportation.
One night I had an idea – the kind of idea that starts your life in a new direction. Looking back it’s funny to hear myself say such life-altering decisions in such a nonchalant way. In 1996 I remember saying to myself “I think I want to start a bicycle chopper gang.” This statement had a similar vibe. The sentence was, “I think I’ll fly a plane around the world.”
The Ground Rules
As someone who knew almost nothing about flying, I thought this would be a great ‘trial by virtual fire’. I knew I needed an airplane that had enough range to make it across large bodies of water, and I knew I wasn’t going to try crossing the Atlantic on my first flight, so I went West. I also came up with some criteria:
- No long breaks mid-flight – a real pilot can’t pause for a couple of days. But short breaks for things like answering the phone are okay.
- Flights are real time – as in no fast-forwarding to the end of the trip.
- No In-flight refueling. If I run out of fuel, I need to find a place to land, even if it’s on a highway somewhere.
- If I crash, the flight was only a bad dream, and I would have to start the leg over again.
- Most importantly, wherever I land, I make an effort to learn about the place through Google Street View, Wikipedia and YouTube, as well as visit the websites of the local art museums, and try to understand what makes that place special. In other words, be a virtual tourist.
Choosing the Aircraft
When it comes to flying, prop planes are more forgiving than jets, and in my opinion they are more fun. They can cruise at slower speeds and that makes landing them less of a challenge. Of course that means jets have much higher cruise speeds and will therefore ‘get you to where you’re going’. Also when it comes to range, jets far outreach the propeller driven planes. Crossing vast oceans makes jets the more appropriate choice for world travel. I have no interest in large commercial jets, especially considering my sim plane of choice so far was an ultralight – the perfect aircraft for sightseers – it’s crawling cruise speed and maximum visibility make it a total delight to fly. The limited stock biz-jet choices in FSX left me with only one real option: the Bombardier Learjet 45.
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Behold the Bombardier Learjet 45 – fast standing still.
It’s not hard to fall in love with a plane like the Lear 45. I could imagine enjoying this plane in real life if I had $13 million to spare, and some spending cash for travel costs. Even with virtual money being no object, I couldn’t imagine the need to fly something bigger than an apartment complex. And even though the fuel and pollutants were simulated, It felt better to make the more humble and appropriate choice: for a jet pilot, that is. Last but not least, I can land on shorter runways with smaller jets.
Into the Wild Blue Yonder
What’s ‘this’ button do? Let’s push it and find out.
Like all journeys into new territory, you start off stumbling and get better as you go. In the beginning I didn’t know how to use autopilot or trim, or how to use the throttle to level off. Most of the buttons and readouts in the cockpit were a complete mystery. I didn’t even know how to navigate to an airport: I used dead reckoning and when I’d see an airstrip I wanted to land at, I’d just point the nose and dive to it, without any communication with air traffic control. Imagine getting away with that in real life! But like with tasks practiced, with each leg of the journey I learned more about how pilots in the real world flew planes. I also adjusted the settings from ‘easy’ to ‘realistic’ as I got better at flying. By the time I left San Fransisco I had all the realism the sim had to offer, other than random mechanical failures.
Upgrades Over Time
There are two parts of the flight simming game – flying the plane is only half of it. The other half is putting together all the hardware and software and then trying desperately to make it work. I’d estimate about 40% of my time spent simming is troubleshooting and doing research. It can be very frustrating when things aren’t working, but there’s a big community who have forums and are willing to share their solutions to tough problems. And everyone in that community knows a lot more than me about simming. If you learn to recognize that ‘building your plane’ is part of the game, then it’s a lot easier to palette.
The Hardware
The current state of hardware, minus the VR helmet. Please note the custom suede.
The yoke I got was a real step towards feeling like I was actually piloting a Learjet 45. However the plastic was seriously cheap feeling. Being the crafty type, I covered the yoke in brown suede. Oh what a feeling!
It can be frustrating trying to turn a virtual dial – I’d use the mouse to click to the right of a button to change the altitude of the autopilot, and sometimes it would take holding the mouse down for a good long while to wait for the virtual dial to reach the desired setting. In the meantime any slight turbulence would move the knob and cause me to have to re-click. This was challenging when trying to control a business jet, particularly when in controlled airspace. I slowly added more and more hardware, to get that real-plane feel. As you can imagine, it cost a bit of cash, but each part was sold separately, so I could spread out the costs over time, and all of it was a lot less expensive than a trip to Paris for sure. In fact, it’s very cheap entertainment if you calculate by the hour.
The Software
On the other side of the coin, I learned how to add a lot more realism the to the sim by adding a lot of third party add-ons – more realistic flight models, improved texture mapping, more complex weather models, etc. The ground didn’t improve much, but the weather modelling improved immensely.
I ‘painted’ my plane in Singapore, by learning how to modify the textures in some deeply nested files with the help of some free software so it no longer had the original, mind-numbingly conservative paint job. I modeled the livery after my African Grey parrot Nemobird – a gray body with light grey belly and a bright red tail.
Why Nemobird, you bear a striking resemblance to my private jet. Note the map I used to mark my way in the background.
As you can see, the graphic on the tail is based on my favorite bird. They even have the same look in their eye.
Top Three Most Memorable Moments Of the World Tour
Of course there are lots of stories to tell, but this story is plenty long enough without telling them all. So here are my top three, in chronological order.
Number One: San Francisco (almost) all the way to Honolulu
Flying from San Francisco to Hawaii was by far the longest leg of the trip. The spec’ed maximum range of the Learjet 45 is 1,968NM. The distance from San Francisco to Honolulu Airport is 2,083NM. Being the cavalier and brazen sort, I had no knowledge of these facts as I optimistically ventured out over the Pacific.
When I left KSFO, I figured it would be a great time to learn how to operate the autopilot feature, as it is a four-and-a-half hour flight and therefore had lots of time to figure it out as I went. By my reckoning, the higher you go, the more time it takes to screw up bad enough to hit the water. Well, it turns out that autopilot is a bit complex, but I did manage to learn how to set the direction to a compass heading, as well as have the plane maintain a certain flight level and airspeed. This sounded like all I needed to know at the time, but it turns out the Pacific Ocean is a windy place, especially at 33,000 feet. This meant that regular course corrections were needed to stay on target. I learned to compensate for the airspeed but this of course was in constant flux. I also didn’t know much about air streams over the Pacific. This adds up to make a less than efficient method of flying to Hawaii.
I left San Francisco with a full tank of fuel: 6,062 pounds. Four hours and forty-five minutes later, I found myself about a hundred miles from Honolulu with about 130 pounds of fuel remaining. According to my predetermined, self-imposed rules, I was unable to magically remedy the situation, and if I crashed into the ocean, this trip would have been a very long bad dream, and I would wake up back in San Francisco to attempt the trip all over again. I radioed ahead and asked for the nearest airport list. I could land at Kalaupapa Airport on the Island of Molikai which was about 30NM closer, shaving some distance off the end of my trip. It’s a small airfield, with a runway of 2,700 feet. The runway spec for a Lear45 is 4,200 feet or more, depending on upgrades, cargo and fuel. This was another fun fact I was blissfully unaware of. The sun was setting over the runway making for a dramatic landing.
This is not the approach vector you are looking for. Move along…
Miraculously I managed to land the plane with 80 pounds of fuel to spare without rolling right off end of the runway. I can’t say if this was due to some poor flight physics in the game, some extraordinary luck, or a combination of both, but I don’t think skill had a huge part in it. In any case, the landing was the most harrowing and thrilling moment I’ve experienced in flight so far. My friends sometimes call me ‘butter-side up’, referring to my good fortune in a toast-dropping way, and this time I dropped the toast hard.
Number Two: Seeing Mount Ararat from Yerevan, Armenia
I used to get my lunch at a place called the Fordees Grill in Watertown, and became friendly with the folks who made my falafel sandwiches. One day I asked the gentleman behind the counter about a picture they had hanging on their wall. He passionately told me the picture was of Mount Ararat, a sacred mountain to the people of Armenia. I told him I about my ‘world tour’, and that I would visit Yerevan to see this mountain for myself. At the time I was thousands of miles away so it took many falafel sandwiches for me to make the journey.
The first time I tried to make to Yerevan, I fell asleep in the ‘pilot’s hammock’, only to wake up to the sound of the jet engines, with the autopilot still engaged, circling 33,000 feet around the airport.I decided this one qualified as one of those ‘bad dreams’. It was the last time I flew in the hammock.
The next day I took off from Ashgabat International airport in Turkmenisan and successfully landed in Yerevan. I was excited to share my good news with the folks at Fordees. The anticipation made the experience a very fulfilling one.
Number Three: The Rock Of Gibraltar
Of all my travels I have never seen such an impressive monolithic limestone promontory. I’ll let this image speak for itself, but I would like to point out that those are clouds rolling down, not a waterfall.
Things I learned about the World on my World Tour
- The world is an enormous place and it takes forever to go around it.
- Circumnavigating the planet isn’t the same thing as seeing the world. I skipped over dozens of countries, and I still haven’t traveled to South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. My ‘world tour’ only reached three of the Earth’s seven continents.
- The Pacific Ocean is a lot bigger than the Atlantic Ocean.
- The government of a country is not necessarily a good representation of the people who live there.
- Wake Island is mindbogglingly isolated.
- Mount Fuji is insanely majestic.
- Flying over Singapore and Hong Kong makes you feel like the whole world is a city.
- Paris is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen from the sky.
The Frustrations Of Virtual Flight
Unfortunately twelve-year-old software running a bunch of complex add-ons connected to a lot of complex hardware made for a very buggy game. Despite having a very decent gaming computer (donated to me by a good friend when he learned what I was doing), it would often take me upwards of an hour to get things running properly. Sometimes I would just give up and not even fly. After a while it became too frustrating for me to want to continue.
Three Years in Dublin
The sun sets in Dublin as the Nemoplane finds its final resting place.
By September of 2017 I became so frustrated with the software that I lost interest in flying altogether. So for three years, I kept all my fancy hardware in an ALC and forgot about it. The Nemoplane settled down in Dublin, Ireland. Then I caught news that Microsoft Flight Simulator was making a big comeback, promising everything you could possibly want in a sim, the biggest of which is real-world land graphics based on Bing maps, gorgeous cloud and weather rendering, and even eventual VR support (for which I’m a big dorky fan). I pre-ordered and waited, and on the 18th of August, 2020 it was released.
Getting things going was very reminiscent of my experiences wrestling with MSX. The UX is extremely confusing. For example, press ESC to cancel, F10 to continue: if you choose to select cancel, click the continue button to continue to cancel. This is just one of many examples of poor wording. I know Microsoft is a big company and therefore the people who make this sim aren’t the same people who make Windows, but it the decisions they make when it comes to the UX baffle me. There’s an initial six hour download, but that’s understandable considering the magic trick this science is performing. There’s no software manual, and when VR support came out a few months later, it was super glitchy and took about a week of troubleshooting for me to be able to see out of both eyes and to have my world line up with the controls. I describe the initial experience to be like drinking from the holy grail with all your fingers broken. I was editing Windows registry keys, switching to Oculus beta software, and some purchasing some third-party software to run my commonly used hardware. But after many weeks of frustrating trail and error, I was rewarded with sitting in a virtual 3D cockpit looking out a very tight approximation of the real world – which is nothing short of breathtaking, and I’m very glad that I stuck with it.
New World – New Plane Needed
I was troubled to learn that new new version of the sim wouldn’t have my trusty Learjet, as each plane takes time to get the feel of that particular model, and it took me a long time to learn how to handle that specific jet. The base version of the game came with one business jet – the Cessna Citation CJ4. However the deluxe aircraft included the Cessna Longitude, which has a very modern glass cockpit. See the comparison below.
| Aircraft | Cruise Speed | Max Altitude | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bombardier LJ45 | 438 KTAS | 51,000 Ft | 1,968 NM |
| Cessna Citation CJ4 | 451 KTAS | 45,000 Ft | 2,165 NM |
| Cessna Longitude | 483 KTAS | 45,000 Ft | 3,500 NM |
After all the island hopping I did in the Pacific Ocean, the range and the cruising speed of the Longitude seemed worth it to me. Also as an artist and a designer, aesthetics have a say, and I think the Longitude is a nicer looking plane.
My New Ride: the Zzyzzy Stratitude
I dubbed the new plane ‘Stratitude’. Note the subtle eye graphic to give it a bird-like vibe.
While the plane is a huge upgrade in every way to the Learjet 45, the Longitude’s stock livery is just as sickeningly corporate as its predecessor. Fortunately the same basic tricks apply to the new version of the sim, and thanks to the guidance of others I was able to modify it to suit my tastes.
The name Zzyzzy (rhymes with ‘dizzy’) comes from a name I came up with for a wizard robot I made.
Picking up where I left off
It inspired me to end my long stay in Dublin and head for Norway – I wanted to fly along the breathtaking coastline before heading home. I made it to the Isle of Man and a few places in Scotland, but the farther north I traveled it became more and more apparent that December in Finland is dark for all but six hours of the day – the sun sets at 3:45 pm in January. While the sim allows you to set your own time and weather, I like to ‘keep it real’. So I decided to save the trip to Finland for summer when the days are very long. It was time to head back to Boston and wrap up the World Tour. I flew back to Paris, then São Miguel Island, St. John’s Newfoundland, and finally back to Logan Airport.
After three years away, it felt very good to be home.
Things I learned about Flying on my World Tour
- I’m nowhere near having the dedication and skill it takes to become a real pilot, but after pretending for a few hundred hours, I have a profound appreciation for the people who do. The control surfaces are insanely sensitive and they need to be handled very precisely. The systems are intensely complex, and there are many factors such as fuel calculation, weather patterns, weight distribution, and emergency procedure training that I’ve barely begun to explore. There’s a reason that all commercial flights have two pilots and a team of people who have prepared and trained for every possible contingency, working to make sure things go smoothy. If you want to fly a jet in the most realistic way possible, be prepared to spend an hour studying the weather, plotting a route, calculating weight balance and fuel consumption, another ten minutes doing a visual inspection, fifteen minutes starting the plane, and another fifteen minutes entering a flight plan, and another fifteen minutes getting to the runway. All this is needed to be done before the plane even leaves the ground.
- Starting a plane from cold and dark is a fun busy-bee activity.
- Taxing is more challenging than you think, but it’s very relaxing once you get the feel for it. Navigating around an airfield is still impossible for me without the cheating guides.
- Takeoff is a bit of excitement, the ascent is fun, the cruise is mellow, the decent is a gradual rise in anxiety to the intense moment of landing, followed (hopefully) by the nice and easy anticlimax of taxing to parking.
- From the moment the plane leaves the ground to the moment it touches down, the ground is relative, not actual. Think of it this way: if the wind is blowing ten knots from the south, essentially the Earth is spinning ten knots from the north.
- Returning the yoke to the center position does not level the plane as I was expecting, it only stops the plane from rotating. To level out from a right-hand turn, you need to turn the yoke to the left and wait until you are level before returning to the center position. This goes for pitch and yaw as well. This seems obvious but it’s not how I was intuitively thinking about flight dynamics at first.
- Thrust is more about lift than it is about speed. You need to cut thrust a lot in order to descend or you’ll rip the wings off.
- When flying a jet you need to do everything a lot earlier than when you are flying a prop plane.
- If people drove cars the way pilots fly planes, there would be almost no accidents. Pilots never cut each other off while taking off and landing, everyone follows the rules to the very last letter, they are as cool as a cucumber, and air traffic control communication is the most efficient and polite conversation I know. There’s a strict structure so that there’s absolutely no ambiguity. Pilots also are trained to handle just about every contingency, and are as prepared as humanly possible. I like using the phonetic alphabet and can sing the ABC song using it.
I did make a conscious decision to change ‘uniform’ to ‘unicorn’ – it’s for the best.
Touchdown Spots of the Virtual World Tour
Here’s the complete list of places I landed and explored in my trip around the world.
| 11/17/2016 | KBOS | Logan | Boston MA | USA |
| 11/17/2016 | KBDL | Bradley Intl | Windsor Locks CT | USA |
| 11/18/2016 | KDTW | Detroit Metro | Detroit MI | USA |
| 11/18/2016 | KMDW | Midway Intl | Chicago IL | USA |
| 11/19/2016 | KORD | O’Hare Intl | Chicago IL | USA |
| 11/19/2016 | KSTL | St. Loius Lambert | St. Louis MO | USA |
| 11/24/2016 | KTCC | Tucumcari | Tucumcari NM | USA |
| 11/26/2016 | KFLG | Flagstaff | Flagstaff AZ | USA |
| 12/1/2016 | KLAS | McCarran Intl | Las Vegas NV | USA |
| 12/10/2016 | KLAX | Los Angeles Intl | Los Angeles CA | USA |
| 12/18/2016 | KSFO | San Francisco Intl | San Francisco CA | USA |
| 12/19/2016 | PHMU | Kalaupap | Molokai HI | USA |
| 12/20/2016 | PHBK | Barking Sands Pacific Missile Range | Kekaha HI | USA |
| 12/21/2016 | PHNL | Daniel K. Inouye Intl | Honolulu HI | USA |
| 12/26/2016 | PMDY | Henderson Flield | Midway Altoll | USA |
| 12/27/2016 | PWAK | Wake Island Airfield | Wake Island | USA |
| 12/27/2016 | RJAM | Minami Torishima Airport | Minami Torishima | Japan |
| 12/27/2016 | RJTH | Hachijojima | Hachijojima | Japan |
| 12/29/2016 | RJTO | Oshima Airport | Izu Oshima | Japan |
| 12/30/2016 | RJAA | Narita International | Tokyo | Japan |
| 1/5/2017 | RJBB | Kansia International | Osaka Bay | Japan |
| 1/17/2017 | RJOA | Hiroshima Airport | Mihara | Japan |
| 1/18/2017 | RKSI | Incheon Intl | Seoul | S Korea |
| 2/8/2017 | ZSPD | Shanghia Pudong Intl | Shanghai | China |
| 2/9/2017 | RCTP | Taoupan Intl | Taipei | Taiwan |
| 2/11/2017 | VHHH | Hong Kong Intl | Hong Kong | Hong Kong |
| 2/15/2017 | VVNB | Noi Bai International | Hanoi | Vietnam |
| 2/17/2017 | VLLB | Luang Prabang Intl | Luang Prabang | Laos |
| 2/18/2017 | VTBD | Bangkok Intl | Bangkok | Thailand |
| 2/21/2017 | VYYY | Yangon Intl | Mingaladon | Myanmar |
| 3/16/2017 | VIDP | Indira Gandhi Intl | Delhi | India |
| 3/17/2017 | OPIS | Islamabad Intl | Islamabad | Pakistan |
| 4/1/2017 | UTAA | Ashgabat Intl | Ashgabat | Turkmenistan |
| 4/11/2017 | UDYZ | Zvartnots | Yerevan | Armenia |
| 4/12/2017 | ITFM | Istanbul Intl | Istanbul | Turkey |
| 5/14/2017 | HECA | Cairo Intl | Cairo | Egypt |
| 5/17/2017 | LGTL | Kasteli | Crete | Greece |
| 5/18/2017 | LGAV | Athens Intl | Athens | Greece |
| 5/20/2017 | LGKF | Kefalonia Intl | Kefalonia | Greece |
| 5/22/2017 | LICA | Lamezia Terme | Calabria | Italy |
| 5/23/2017 | LICJ | Falcone Borsellino | Palermo Sicily | Italy |
| 5/24/2017 | LIRF | Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino | Rome | Italy |
| 5/27/2017 | LIPZ | Venice Marco Polo | Tessera | Italy |
| 5/30/2017 | LFPG | Charles-de-Gaulle | Paris | France |
| 6/2/2017 | LEPA | Palma de Mallorca | Mallorca | Spain |
| 6/3/2017 | LEMD | Madrid–Barajas | Madrid | Spain |
| 6/5/2017 | LPPT | Libson | Libson | Portugal |
| 6/17/2017 | GMMN | Mohamed V | Cassablanca | Morocco |
| 6/18/2017 | LXGB | Gibraltar Intl | Gibraltar | UK |
| 6/21/2017 | LPPS | Porto Santo | Porto Santo | Portugal |
| 6/22/2017 | LPMA | Cristiano Ronaldo Intl | Madeira | Portugal |
| 7/10/2017 | GCLP | Gran Canaria | Gran Canaria | Portugal |
| 8/11/2017 | LPPD | Joao Paulo II | São Miguel Island Azores | Portugal |
| 9/1/2017 | LECO | A Coruña | A Coruña | Spain |
| 9/14/2017 | EIDW | Heathrow | London | England |
| 9/15/2017 | EIDW | Dublin Intl | Dublin | Ireland |
| 12/18/2020 | EINN | Shannon | Shannon | Ireland |
| 12/19/2020 | EGNS | Isle of Man | Isle of Man | UK |
| 12/20/2020 | EGPK | Glasgow Prestwick | Glasgow | Scotland |
| 12/21/2020 | EGPU | Tiree | Tiree | Scotland |
| 12/22/2020 | EGPL | Benbecula | Benbecula Island | Scotland |
| 12/24/2020 | EGPO | Stornoway | Stornoway Ilse of Lewis | Scotland |
| 12/27/2020 | LFPG | Charles-de-Gaulle | Paris | France |
| 12/26/2020 | LPPD | Joao Paulo II | São Miguel Island Azores | Portugal |
| 12/27/2020 | CYYT | St. John’s Intl | St. John’s | Canada |
| 12/27/2020 | KBOS | Logan Intl | Boston MA | USA |
The Most Pragmatic Lesson I Learned from Flying a Pretend Jet
Playing pretend jet pilot helped me become a better cyclist. I now take a lot of pride and enjoyment in trying my best to do everything as safely, courteously, and as professionally as possible while I’m on my bike. For a few years I had a toy jet plane affixed to my stem, which served as a fitting icon to my cycling motto: ‘fastest safe speed’.
More recently I’ve needed the reminder less and less, so the totem has been reduced to a tiny metal pin of a the Lear45 that I painted to match my virtual plane. It’s a bit more classy, but I still make engine noises when I ride.
What’s Next?
As I was approaching Logan Airport from St. John’s, my thoughts dwelled on what big adventure was next for the Stratitude. I considered pretending to be James Bond’s private jet pilot, traveling everywhere he went to in all the movies, but I may be losing interest in epic oceanic flights for a while. I was considering rewriting the rules in the sense that I could teleport to any airport that I’ve successfully landed at previously, unlocking new airports as I travel to them. I may try that out, but for now I’ve decided to head south, following the East coast. At the very least I will finish up in the Florida Keys, and at most I will circumnavigate the Americas. At the time of this post, the Stratitude has safely landed at JFK after a scenic coastal route. Wish me luck on my next leg, and if you managed to read this entire story, I suspect you have the stamina for a very long flight indeed. Thanks for reading.