Planes, Trains or Recreational Vehicles: The Good, the Bad and the Assassination-Level Irritating
Planes, Trains & Automobiles.
Throw Momma From The Train.
Airport. And its many sequels.
Much has been said about transportation, but it takes personal experience - or listening to someone who has had personal experience - to be able to decide whether, the next time you go on vacation, you should fly, drive, ride, float or walk.
I have flown on many different airlines in my time and have had sufficient close encounters of the airline kind to know what I like and what I find mildly annoying or assassination-level irritating. I liked being able to stretch out over three seats at the back of an overnight flight from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, and I loved being able to swop seats to be next to friends on a ten hour flight from Johannesburg to Tel Aviv. Mildly irritating, and somewhat disturbing, was the fact that the onboard announcements on that Tel Aviv flight were all in Hebrew - wondering what the panicky sounding ones meant was especially pleasant - and assassination-level irritating was when I landed in Johannesburg and my luggage continued on to Durban.
For me, the rule that I have learned to live by when flying is as follows: window seat for domestic flights and aisle seat for international flights. This has to do with getting to the bathrooms, and the longer the flight, the easier the bathroom escape route has to be. Although I would recommend flying, there are some trips for which one doesn't really have much of a choice. Rowing to Australia, for instance, would take an awfully long time, and one's arms would tend to get quite tired.
In my experience, ships have always been of the cruise variety, and I haven't - yet - had the pleasure of meeting a sailing ship or, perhaps, a catamaran, which would take me for a sail around the Caribbean. The cruise ships that I have been on have all tended to remind me of floating five-star hotels. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does make a ship seem not very...well...shippy. It's hard to start thinking about starboard and port (and perhaps some wine) when all you can see are wall-to-wall one armed bandits and floor to ceiling mirrors. I'm seriously thinking about roughing it next time, although possibly not how Thor Hyerdahl and his balsa-wood Kon Tiki raft would define roughing it.
Of the three most popular forms of travelling, trains are by far my favorite. With a 'plane, you get on at an airport, and you get off at an airport, and, for all you know, the 'plane just circled the first airport 5,000 times and then dropped you at an adjacent airfield. What I'm saying is, there is no perception of distance with a 'plane. But with a train, you get to see absolutely everything as it slowly passes by your carriage window. You can also eat while you watch, and being allowed to eat while I'm doing something always makes me very happy.
I've travelled in RVs (they're like snails as you live in the house on the car's back), I've travelled on horseback (we never DID find out why my horse insisted on always bolting into the nearest river) and I've travelled on foot (hiking may be your friend but it's not mine), but I always come back to the train. A train would therefore be my #1 recommendation for both domestic and, when possible, international travel.
Buying tickets or hiring vehicles these days is also fairly simple as all you need is a credit card and either a real-live travel agent or one of those know-it-all online travel sites that does everything except pack your suitcase. It's not like the old days where you had to bargain with a guide for a ride on a camel.
Although, come to think of it, that's EXACTLY what Egypt is like.
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