el avión

So.. today I had my first flight and it was definitely an adventure. I’m going to enlighten you with my first experience and the journey up to it. Just the thought of flying has always freaked me and I had avoided it up until today. So, this morning, I woke up and had to bring my aunt/uncle and cousin to the airport. My whole family decided to up and go to NYC for the weekend. I was using this experience as my “practice flight” since the flight to Costa Rica is international and much longer than the hour and some change it is to fly to NYC. So, back to my morning, I brought them to the airport and I was already queezy. I came back to house and finished up packing [it took forever to fill up my TINY carry on,  haha] but yeah, and throughout this whole time I had been freaking out so much that I hadn’t eaten anything so I ate some leftover breakfast food and sat around until the time came. And by golly, it came. Next thing I knew, we on our way.

I’ve heard alot of things about airport security but I didn’t know what I was getting myself into until I saw the lines. I went in headfirst with my luggage, license, and ticket in hand but I came out much more distressed. I had a balled up ticket, no sign of a license and had to zip up all my bags that got searched. Few things I learned during this 5 minute experience. First off, you can’t bring hair mousse and hairspray in your carry on bag unless it is a minuscular size [which, if you have hair like mine, you’d use the whole bottle in one morning]. Also, make sure you take your laptop out so that they don’t strip search you. The weirdest thing was that you have to take off your shoes? Really? What can I keep in there? A knife? No, that would be painful. A gun? My shoes aren’t THAT big. It was pretty silly if you ask me but I guess I don’t know too much since today is my first day in the air. After they searched my back pack, threw out my mousse and hair spray and stripped me of all my courage we tried to continue but I had no license. Somehow it got lost in the trip from my hand through the x-ray machine and back to my hand but within a couple mins the security guard had brought it back to me. So that situation was a mess so my confidence about this whole thing was super low but anyways moving on. 

As we boarded the plane, I got to peek in the cock pit [and the pilot talked to me too :)], it was tiny and not at all what I imagined but if you ask me i think than rather than making me take off my shoes for security reasons, you should probably keep the door to the cockpit closed [but then again, what do I know?] So yeah, I walk into the plane expecting first class to be super fancy and coach to be super un-fancy, but both of them were lacking. I did not picture a 2x2 plane to be flying to NYC, I pictured at least a 3x3. The seats were as tight as I imagined but for some reason I expected it to be way grander, super disappointing. Anyways, at this point I was ready to go and my cousin and aunt had already been making fun of me and my anxiety so I was thinking "bring it on!" So I latched on to my moms arm, sat back and relaxed [or ya know, gritted my teeth] and got ready for lift off. Taking off was wild, I couldn't believe that we went from sitting at idol to going that fast in 3.5 seconds. For a few minutes as we were rising, I couldn't look out the window but after a little while I was able to enjoy the beautiful sights. IT WAS ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS! GOD IS AMAZING! 

It was crazy to see the tiny cars and trees that I knew to be so big when I was next to them from so far up in the sky. Riding through the clouds and watching the sunset were absolutely to die for. Hitting air pockets kind of caught me off guard but I felt like not very long after we were getting up in the air, we started to "prepare for landing." This process sounds a lot more intese than it is. The only intense part was that it lasted like 20 minutes even though the actual process was not painful at all. I liked it a TON more than taking off. After the whole thing, I was super proud of myself and cracking up because I imagine flying to be some super crazy event and then when you flying everyone was having a great time [kind of like the train scene with the "hot chocolate" on Polar Express]. Although my trip started off rough, it ended up to be a very good experience and I'm kind of ready to get back on that plane again. 

Baha, thanks for bearing with me through that painful reading experience but now I can say that I have flown and that I am not as scared as I was. Now to experience the city that never sleeps!

[pictures from the trip to come.]