So, while in Bellingham, I finally got to tour the Boeing Museum of Flight and walk through a BAC Concorde (G-BOAG) - I had always wanted to fly on one, but that was rather out of reach. Interestingly, it was very small and not very plush inside. Apparently, the experience was in the service and the speed.
This week, the QE2 makes its final transatlantic crossing - then it makes a Mediterranean cruise before being gutted out, towed to Dubai and converted (as in physically revised) into a floating hotel and casino. Always wanted to cross on the QE2.
And, this morning, I found this picture on Airliners.net (yes, there's a porn site for airline geeks such as I am) It's a picture of a DC-3 at Berlin Tempelhof airport. I've always wanted to fly into Tempelhof, that's the Berlin airport that was built for the 1938 Berlin Olympics. it's one of only two manmade structures in the world that's large enough to be seen from outer space (the other being the great wall of China). The airplanes pull in and park inside the structure (as you can see in the picture). It's the airport into which all the flights went for the Berlin airlift.
The airport is closing forever on 31 Oct. Tempelhof is now considered unsafe for airport operations; the city is grown up all around it, and the runways are too short. Berlin is rebuilding one of its three airports into a totally new facility and they're closing the other two, Tempelhof being the first to go.
In short order, Tempelhof's runways will be dug up, and that land redeveloped. The terminal building itself will be modified for some other use, and that it was once the world's first modern international airport will be available only through photographs and the memories of those who flew there.
If I did manage to go, would it be as my visit to Concorde was? Anti-climactic? I don't know. It is just an airport. The reward and attachment I used to have to elements of the past has faded into nothingness.
For instance, twenty years ago, I paid good money for a piece of coal from the Titanic wreck site, and an autographed photo of she who is now the last Titanic survivor, Melvinia Dean. Ms. Dean has reached an age where she requires ongoing care, and she is selling the last of her Titanic related memorabilia, including the child's sized wicker suitcase given her by the New York charities to carry her belongings once she arrived with her mother and family in New York on the Carpathia.
A few years ago, before the Green Imperial, I'd have been rabid for that suitcase. I'd have displayed it carefully with other momentos of a life that wasn't my own, and dusted it periodically; showing it to visitors and relating the story of what it was and how I came to possess it.
Now, I have no interest in it. Judy said to me yesterday that she would love to have the ability to buy that wicker suitcase for me, but that's a me that doesn't exist anymore.
Just as I reach this point in my life, I find that the market for such "treasures" has collapsed along with people's home equity lines of credit. So, I'll be hanging onto my "collection," perhaps in boxes, until a rosier day when they can be disposed of favorably.
So, it's much less my dream of flying into Tempelhof and seeing the 1930s terminal that has bitten the dust. It's my interest in seeking out fulfillment from these things outside myself that mean nothing in a life that's focused on now.
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