Plane envy

My wife and I recently flew to Corpus Christi, Texas with my sister-in-law and her pilot husband in his Beechcraft Bonanza airplane. If you’re not familiar with a Bonanza, it’s a small, single engine airplane that holds 4 people. You can buy one for about $120,000.

It was an adventure for us! Flying at 6000 feet, looking at landmarks, listening to the air traffic controllers on our headsets.

A few minutes after we landed at Corpus Christi, another aircraft landed and stopped nearby. It was a Hawker jet. Nice airplane! It’s a $10 million aircraft.

Now, here’s the test. A lot of people would have seen that gorgeous Hawker jet and envy would have ruined their whole trip.

“Wow, I’d give anything to have an airplane like that…”
“Can you imagine what it would be like to ride in that jet?”
“Boy, we could have cut 3 hours off our travel time in a plane like that.”

My brother-in-law admired the Hawker but commented, “Yeah, it’s nice, but I couldn’t afford the fuel it would take just to start it up.”

We continued our trip and had a fantastic time, grateful for the time to spend with family, grateful for a safe flight, rather than griping about what we didn’t have.

What are you grateful for? Do you give thanks or spew complaints? Would your spouse agree?
Your co-workers?

Give thanks this week for something you normally take for granted.

This entry was posted on February 3, 2008 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.