The destination is worth the bumpy ride

I’m back home in Newport Beach after a few weeks of travel, and I’m still basking in the afterglow of my wonderful adventure. I saw many fascinating sights, expanded my understanding of foreign cultures, made new friends, ate and drank excessively, and — best of all — reunited with my college student son who was studying abroad.

But none of those experiences are the subject of this column. Instead, I am compelled to write in defense of one of the most maligned activities of modern times: air travel.

Airlines are among the most-hated companies in the world, consistently ranking at or near the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys. Sewage disposal gets more respect. Indeed, anyone who has ever set foot on a plane seems to have a trove of complaints, including those perennial favorites, lost-luggage horror stories and babies “who cried the entire flight.”

As teeth-grindingly irritating as the process can be, however, I choose to view air travel in a different light. To me, all the annoyances of flying commercial pale next to the excitement of knowing that I’m going somewhere. When adventures await, why should I care if airplane meals only vaguely resemble real food, or that the person sitting in front of me smells just like the overripe guys who always seems to choose the treadmill next to mine at the gym?

Granted, I don’t have to travel for work, and I recognize that business travel is an altogether different proposition than the pleasure trips I take. Even so, it’s not as if anyone is forced to traverse the continent in covered wagons or endure months-long sea voyages around the Horn in scurvy-ridden buckets in order to peddle goods in far-off lands. That we can actually get halfway around the globe in less than a day, for whatever reason, still seems utterly miraculous.

It’s not just the act of flying that sets people off. Many of my fellow travelers see airports as horrible, soul-sucking places that combine all the customer service virtues of the DMV with the charm of a hospital waiting room. All they want to do is get in and out as quickly as possible. Take my husband, who deems all airport lines to be “ridiculous” and is generally miserable from the moment we close our front door until we arrive at our destination.

While I sympathize, I view these giant way stations as fantastic buzzing hubs of human energy and industry, imbued with the intoxicating promise of new worlds to explore. When I arrive at an airport I puff up with an almost-smug sense of sophistication and purpose. As I navigate my wheeled bag through the swarm, I think of myself as a seasoned, worldly traveler unfazed by shoeless encounters with airport scanners and dead-eyed TSA agents. It’s all part of the game, and I’m happy to play along.

Sure, I’ve had my flying mishaps, my missed connections, inconvenient schedule changes and unexplained cancellations. My bags were once stranded for four days at an airport 6,000 miles from my destination before finally being put on a flight headed my way. Another time, when my luggage went missing, a weary baggage claim agent pointed to a mountain the size of Montana made of a single day’s haul of misplaced items, telling me I was welcome to begin excavations on my own.

I’ve struggled to hold down lunch while on roller coasters of turbulence and sat rocking to and fro on a runway during a whipping thunderstorm in Chicago, the pilot reluctant to lose our place in the takeoff queue, even after the plane in front of us was struck by lightning and had to be towed back to the terminal. And I swear I’ll never get used to those nerve-jarring takeoffs out of John Wayne Airport.

Flying, I’ll admit, can also seem a bit surreal at times. Like other fliers, I’ve taken some inexplicably strange routes to get from point A to point B. After meeting up with my son — the one who was studying abroad — I nearly choked when he told me that to get back to Spain after spending his Spring break in Italy, he first flew hundreds of miles in the opposite direction, to Istanbul. This saved him the princely sum of $35 over the next-cheapest flight, he explained. The bizarre calculus that dictates how airfares are set is a mystery I’ll never fully comprehend.

So yes, air travel can be frustrating, exhausting, infuriating and anxiety-inducing. For those who can’t get over the whole thing about being thousands of feet off the ground, it can also be terrifying. Add in understandable concerns over security threats, and flying can seem like an activity that no sane person would actually love.

Call me crazy then, because I relish nothing better than putting my clear plastic bag of 3-ounce toiletries on a conveyor belt, walking miles to get to the furthest possible gate, listening to yet another seminar on how to buckle a seat belt and bracing for the seat-back in front of me to land in my lap.

It feels great to be back home after my long journey. But I can’t wait to get back on another plane and begin a new adventure.

PATRICE APODACA is a former Newport-Mesa public school parent and former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She lives in Newport Beach.