Taking off

We’re in an apartment right now that overlooks a small rural airport. It has a three times a day service to Reykjavik with a big turboprop and a couple of small privately owned fixed wing airplanes.

As a kid I always looked at the sky out of my bedroom window and fantasised about being beamed up into one of the planes that flew overhead. I imagined sitting behind one of the small lighted windows and en-route to somewhere else. Anywhere but my bedroom. I tried to figure out where they came from, where they were going and what the people in that plane were up to. There were no apps back then to help you with that so it just came down to guesswork.

I haven’t had that feeling in a long time. But I had it today when looking at the 9.40 Icelandic Air turboprop taking of for Reykjavik. It’s not that I’m desperate to get to Reykjavik (we’ll be there in a few days) but it’s just so damn romantic.

The Ryanair, EasyJet and Luton gang of cheap flights and bad service have sucked all the romance out of flying. There’s no sexiness in taking the 7 a.m. flight to fucking Berlin Brandenburg where you get charged an absolute fortune for a miserable bag of peanuts. Flying in Europe has lost its charm.

But here in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Iceland I’ve found some of that romance. The airport I’m looking at now has a tiny terminal without any shitty coffee chain and without duty free perfume. Just walk up to the plane and take of into the grey skies from a runway that probably doubles as the village playground in the winter when the snow is too high to land the planes.

So for the first time in a long while I’m looking up again, wishing I was in an airplane. Not because I want to leave where I’m at now. But purely because of the flying itself.