So I was sitting in the airport, waiting for my friend to come through the gate. The airport I was wasn’t an international one, just one that has domestic flights to different parts of country. My friend, however was coming from a connecting flight from an airport that was a major international hub. Because the island I live on doesn’t have an international airport, you can’t fly here directly from outside the country. You have to make a connection.
Some people don’t like to make connections. I remember I had a connection once in Seoul, where I had to wait for about ten hours. I don’t know if you’ve stayed ten hours in an airport where you were stuck in the international section, but it’s pretty boring. Because you are only passing through, and not staying, you can’t really go outside, because you’d have to go through customs, and figure out what to do with your bags, and it is generally a big hassle. Of course if you have to stay in such a boring section of an airport with uncomfortable seats, and only one channel on TV, then you can figure out a way to go outside your comfort zone and explore what is outside. There can be some pretty cool stuff out there sometimes.
Other people will go to great lengths to avoid making a connection. I don’t know if they think that making a connection is an inconvenience, or something bad will happen, like they might lose something. Sometimes people can’t help, despite how hard they try but to make a connection. Personally, I think connections can e really good. They can really make a trip more enjoyable. It adds to the distance between where you are coming from, and where you are going. Some people would just like to disappear at point A, and then reappear at point B. For them, traveling is a nuisance to be avoided at all costs. I suppose if you were going to an important business meeting where people would be discussing life and death situations of profits and mergers and other issues, you might want to stay focused, and teleport yourself there. But when you are traveling for fun, I think connections are fantastic.
The most elaborate sequence of connections I made was for a seminar I went to on an island in Belize. First I flew from LAX to Miami. Then I took another big plane from Miami to the Capital of Belize. Then I took a small chartered plane from the capital of Belize to the island. Then, because the part of the island I was going to wasn’t connected by enough land to build a road, I had to wait for a taxi boat to take me to my final destination. Then I had to walk through sand to get to my bungalow. It really made feel like I was in a completely different world. Los Angeles seemed like a whole other side of the galaxy, a million light years in the past.
Some connections can be long, some can be short, others can be really interesting and unexpected. Somebody I was talking to in an airport bar told me that connections aren’t really a hindrance, they’re really are a conspired sequence of people and events that are helping you to get where you are going. And it’s pretty cool knowing that wherever you want to go, you’ll likely run across a secret group of people to pop out of nowhere and help you along the way.
Who knows, you may even be one of these secret people that can pop out of nowhere to help somebody else.
When my friend finally showed up, she was really glad to be here. I asked her if she had any jet lag, and all she said was that although she had remembered thinking before she left that she might have jet let when she got here, she didn’t think her jet leg was nearly as bad as she had predicted before left. Which just goes to show, that when you get something new, like this, you can’t help but wonder why you didn’t discover this before, simply because you were able to make the connection.