Travel is what I want to do with my life. I want to go places and see things. Tourism isn’t what I mean either. Just seeing the same things other people can see or will see so that I can impress them when I know about it too, doesn’t seem like fun to me. I want to mention places that no one else has heard of. I love Anthony Bourdain’s show as well as Andrew Zimmern’s, though his not as much. It also may explain my love of space and space travel. The downside to seeing the world is that unless you are quite well off, it is incredibly costly, rather uncomfortable, and potentially dangerous. A good friend of mine wants to climb Everest which is a great example of all three rolled into one. My unique health concerns also preclude me from being nearly as daring as perhaps I once was, but I don’t think it will keep me out of all travel. I mean no more so than any other limiting factor would. One new factoid I just read about however just might make me think twice before I whip out my Passport…Baggage. I have learned to travel light and it seems that the further from civilization you get, the less you actually need to bring. (Material possessions are for westerners.)
I know for a fact that people are stupid. It is intrinsic in us. We have no instinct, we have no skills. Everything humans accomplish is a learned ability. It is why we had to learn to write while other species don’t. Imagine your surgeon trying to do a Liver transplant without ever reading a book, but only “shadowing” another surgeon for a period of time? Actually the more I think about it, the more feasible that seems, but I tell you what..I don’t want to be there first patient. So when I see that there were 25 million pieces of luggage lost for good last year it doesn’t really surprise me. But that breaks down to a total number of 3000 pieces per hour! I have no way of knowing just how many people fly each day but with each state averaging lets say, 3 major airports operating each day, then that means 20 bags/airport get lost each hour. That number small as it may be is still fairly large and you could say that maybe half are due to human ineptitude. So that leaves 1500 bags per hour getting truly lost, stolen, or misdirected by the airlines. This leads me to just one conclusion.
Never check anything of value. Ask DJ’s, they know. DJ A-Trak blogs about his travels often and he makes sure that when he gets on a plane he always carries his most essential items. I also love how the list above does not include employee theft or Plane crashes. If I had to do a break down it would look like this:
- Human Idiocy: 42%
-Airline Mistake: 51%
-Theft after check in (by security): 15%
-Pirates: 13%
The maximum value insurance will cover for a lost bag is $5,000 USD so make sure if you’re carrying around your gold brick collection that you spread it around. Though with gold coming in at right around $1,100/oz and most bars weighing in at 400oz…you may want to find some other way of transporting those things.
No comments:
Post a Comment