Remember when you dressed up to take a flight?

When I first started taking the airlines, people dressed up to board the plane. There was an aire of "being on your best behavior." It was an event.

Compare this to taking a cross country bus ride.

I did both in 1979. The plane trip was like taking limo to a wedding. The bus trip was like taking, well, a bus to a funeral.

On the plane, people were nice and polite. People were clean and well dressed. On the bus, there were crop pickers, foreign students with back packs, soldiers going home, families going a visiting, and assorted riff raff.

The plane zipped you right to the city you were going to. The bus seemed to stop at every small town between here and the coast. Once the bus stopped in the middle of the wilderness, to dump a young man off for continually smoking pot in the back row.

At one bus stop, in Nashville, TN, a man tried to rob me at knife point in the men's room. I laughed at him and walked out. I was pretty naive I guess. It is a wonder he did not cut my throat.

People always complain about the airline food. They said it was too hot, too cold, too bland, too plain. Compare that to the food of the bus line of the time and it was heaven. Compare it to the service you get now, and you are left with only a sense of longing.

I traveled recently by plane. They have morphed into the buses of memory. It is like some planner took the concept of the bus system and decided to set it up in a police station. While the seedy areas and red light areas of any major city in America use to be near the bus station, they are now usually on on the roads near the airport. As any traveling sheeple can tell you, "if you want a good time, go to Airport Road." Just don't take a plane.