Flight of Fancy

Amelia Earhart sold her airplane to buy a fast bright yellow car sometime in her late 20s, so she could drive across country from California to Boston to help her mother, who was sick. It was the beginning of a few long hard flightless years of poverty for her.
After she was whisked out of her burgeoning career in social work to fly across the Atlantic as the first female (passenger) to do that, she got famous and spent the rest of her life not just setting records but lecturing endlessly around the country, in the name of equality for women and airplanes for everyone. She pioneered feminism and the passenger airplane industry.
Maybe it's a little ironic to listen to her extensive biography while driving across the country, my act of active rebellion against airplanes.
I wanted to travel with a little more continuity, on the ground, to see the world I was traversing end to end. I wanted to manage my own luggage, my own security, my own destinations.
Flying in an airplane can feel a little like going through a worm hole, teleporting from one place to another. You hand over your ticket, your luggage, your money to someone else, and sit down and wait until you are in the destination airport. It's as if the San Francisco airport is connected directly to JFK (or perhaps Denver) with just a wait of a couple of hours of waiting time in between.
I've heard that it takes about the same amount of fuel, gas, petroleum, to fly across the country non-stop in a full 747 as it does to drive across the country in a small car with 2 people in it. So it's not like there's a big fuel advantage one way or another. But it's easy to forget, when flying, about the petroleum being burned on our behalf, about the enormity of the journey.
When i was in my early 20s, i swore to myself that i would never be sponsored by petroleum or automobiles. I guess at this age i would add airlines into the picture as well. Racing bicycles for oil is antithetical to the reason i started racing in the first place. But traveling all over the place, flying, driving, whatever, supports the industry as much as advertising.
My big trip is strengthening my resolve to go home and really invest in the local racing scene, in competition with the local racers I meet each week. Traveling is physically exhausting and expensive, drawing energy away from the endeavor to train and race. And yet maybe I had to travel to regain the sense of perspective and appreciation for what I have at home.

And that's liberation. Freedom.