Prologue
Finally, we landed. This was the last leg of our series of exhausting flights. The nightmare was over. As a seven-year-old little girl, my first experiences traveling by plane were not pleasant ones. The worst part of our journey was the overseas flight from Vienna to New York. It was long, and because we flew so far above the clouds, it often felt as if the plane wasn’t even moving, as though we hovered in one spot for hours! I don’t recall turbulence, just frustration at what I perceived to be a lack of progress. Of course, there was nothing to distract our young minds as we sat for those hours, and that certainly didn’t help matters. In 1980, there were no small television screens playing cartoons or movies, nor headphones to provide a musical distraction, and my parents didn’t have crayons or coloring books to keep us children occupied. The food served by the flight attendants was bland, which was really disappointing since this was the closest thing to eating at a restaurant I would get to experience until that point in my life. The fact that smoking was allowed on the plane didn’t help either. Wafting cigarette smoke was nauseating to those of us not accustomed to being surrounded for hours by its thick fumes and pungent smell. I realized then that this would never become my favorite method of travel, especially as our plane neared our destination in New York City.
The change in cabin pressure during our descent caused excruciating pain in my ears. It’s possible that the landing had to be more deliberate due to inclement weather, or the pilots may have just been aggressive in their approach to landing, or maybe I just wasn’t meant to fly. Regardless, I was in tears and holding my head as the plane neared the runway. In the last few minutes, the pain seemed unbearable, and I distinctly recall screaming, tears soaking my face as I was sure my eardrums were going to explode. We landed, however, and I survived. It goes without saying that I wished we were done with air travel, but I knew we had one more flight to endure. Thankfully, this final flight was a shorter one, and I didn’t experience the pain I had at the end of our overseas flight. By now, I just wanted to be on land, and remain there. It was such a relief once we landed in Cleveland, and I was assured that we would remain on solid ground.
Our voyage started just a couple of days prior on a very cold October night on a rackety, loud, uncomfortable train from my birthplace in Nagyvárad (Oradea), in the Transylvanian region of Romania. I’ve spent considerable time throughout my life telling people that my internal thermometer is broken because I always seem to be the coldest person in the room. In this case, however, I had a legitimate excuse for shivering like the last leaf on a tree at the end of autumn. For reasons I will never understand, several of the windows in our train car were open! I was too shy and intimidated by the large number of strangers around us to ask why they couldn’t just close them, so I had no choice but to shiver in silence. To make things worse, we left late in the evening, so I was drowsy and just wanted a place to lay down and sleep. I probably did dose off at some point as we rode that train to Bucharest, from where we embarked on the first of our three flights. For me, however, everything about this trip was a tormenting nightmare.
[Chapter 1 coming soon]
Unexpected Journey 