Travel Thursday: The Metaphor of It

I’m giving up on Existential Thursdays. Got tired of pushing that rock up the hill! Instead, let’s try Travel Thursday because it’s always nice to go somewhere, especially when you can’t.

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of territories we have conquered and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and never will have.*

Excerpted from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

Porter Airlines Deserves to Be Expediaed

There are those who talk of Porter Airlines as a quaint raccoonish airline with prop planes, retro uniforms and free beer, forgetting their essential problem of flights perpetually delayed and cancelled. Returning home to New York, we had yet another cancellation and decided to make the nine-hour drive instead – a prescient choice given that the re-booked flight was also cancelled the next day. The only problem was that we booked on Expedia, who lulled us into believing that they would refund us automatically. Nine days later, no refund posted, I was subjected to the limbo of hold and repeat until, almost an hour later, they released me from their specific hell. And so I propose that Porter merge with the Expedia so they might be grounded together.