Welcome to my Substack, A Life in Travel

A Small Tale of My First Flight

A warm hello to all out there from my dining table, the nerve center for Adventures with Sarah. It is on this table that many interesting ideas have been born—trips planned, blogs written, cooking videos made, and now, running a full grown tour business. My, how times have changed.

I thought perhaps we should start at the beginning. You may know me from my days as a Rick Steves tour guide, where I made popular videos on how to pack and where I wrote a passionately researched guidebook to Sicily. You might instead know me because of my pandemic reinvention, “Cucina Quarantena” and later, the tour guide collaborative, Guide Collective. These are my past 20 years or so, but travel was a theme in my life far before. So, I thought I would kick off with a little story from my first flight abroad when I was 10 years old.

In 1985, my dad was a fairly successful stock broker. He occasionally won incentive trips and traveled to work in other stock exchanges. In June 1985, dad had a trip to London planned with my mom, and they decided to bring my sister and I along. I was 10, going on 11, and my sister had just turned 16. On her 16th birthday, she was hoping for a car or at least a scooter as her big present (no, my family didn’t have that kind of money but she hoped we did) but to her grave dismay, her big gift was a set of luggage. We are almost 40 years on from that incident and my sister is still upset.

I, on the other hand, was thrilled to get my first suitcase. I can still see it in my mind, it was one of those large, rectangular ones with the tiny wheels and a leash at one end. It was brownish, and I tied a bow on the leash so that it made me feel like I was walking an elegant dog, like an Afghan. People didn’t travel abroad much in 1985, and at the time, we thought we would need everything we owned…just in case. Bring everything I certainly did, but I vaguely remember that I forgot to bring anything useful. You see, my parents had left for London a few weeks ahead of us, and we were left in the care of my, ummm, “colorful” grandma.

I am fairly certain that grandma was far more focused on Benny Hill episodes and bingo than our trip, and just told us to pack stuff. I am also certain that I packed stuffed animals and books, rather than clothes and shoes. The result of my poor packing was that I hiked in the Swiss Alps in slippery sandals, the only shoes I’d brought, and later the same sad sandals stepped in a huge pile of sheep’s poo in Ireland and I had nothing to do but to scrub them.

At the time, we lived in Ventura, California, and our flight was out of LAX. My step-grandfather, Vic, didn’t have much of a way with kids but grandma instructed him to drive us to LAX for our flight. At the end of the 2 hour drive, grandpa pulled up to the curb at the TWA terminal, we got out and he drove off. Two kids standing on the sidewalk with giant suitcases full of rubbish and an envelope with paper tickets and passports.

I honestly don’t know how we navigated getting on to the airplane. Neither of us had ever flown anywhere. But we figured it out somehow, a skill that both my sister and I still use. We are scrappy.

Flying in the 80’s was an elegant affair. We had been told to dress nicely, so we both had dresses and jackets on. When we sat down in the cushy leather seats, I excitedly pushed every button to see what they would do. One of those buttons called the stewardess who gave me a stern talking to, since I shouldn’t call unless I really needed her. To this day, I will never touch the call button on an airplane, even if I am bleeding out of my eyeballs, as it seems it will summon the same angry TWA air hostess.

I fiddled with the ashtray in the armrest—remember the days when people could smoke on flights? There were not any smokers in my house, other than the aforementioned colorful grandma, so I didn’t quite understand that storing candy in that little dish was a bad idea.

After a long, long flight, we arrived at Heathrow, and my parents were there to greet us, along with an assortment of my grandma’s siblings. Colorful grandma was from Liverpool, so our trip kicked off with a family reunion and a breakfast of black pudding. There were many unforgettable moments on that trip, but the sight and smell of black pudding as my first foreign food is one that will live in infamy.

The next month was a whirlwind trip through continental Europe with my parents. We posed with British Bobbies, made daisy chains in the Alps, got yelled at by German border guards, and had the wildest, weirdest experiences that any 10 year-old from Southern California could have imagined. It was the defining moment of my childhood, I suppose, and the one that set my imagination and desire for travel ablaze. So if you enjoy my writing or my tours, you can thank my dad for bringing us on that business trip, or perhaps Grandpa Vic who forced my sister and I to become the scrappiest travel kids on the block.