Philippines Part1

Anyone with a computer and the ability to close your eyes and imagine the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical sensations of a new place can enjoy themselves with a Virtual Vacation. I fully understand that this is not the ideal and that most would want to actually experience it in person on location. With that being said, today's economy will just not allow everyone to be able to experience it.

With that said we will start with a multi-post journey to the Philippines. I chose this for my first post because it is someplace I have actually had the pleasure of visiting in person and I can thus use it as a basis against which to measure the effectiveness of my research on locations and how accurate they really are. The flight itself will be my actual experience and I will transition into the virtual part of this as we land in Manila

It is the month of February just before Valentine's Day and I am sitting at the bar in the Harrisburg International Airport in Middletown PA getting a little bit of liquid courage at 7:30 in the morning. I am about to take the very first plane flight of my life and I have a doozy coming up. My first airplane trip will take me halfway around the world and require almost 20 hours in the air. With me sit a few of my friends who are keeping me amused with stories of how if anything happens while on the plane it will be catastrophic and I will never know it happened. I feel so very much more at ease after this.

8:30 AM and the announcement comes that they are boarding my flight. I walk down the jet way and find my seat on an MD80 Jet from Northwest Airlines. The first hop is to Detroit and while I have very long legs and would preferred an aisle seat I make the best of the window seat. I am determined to watch every aspect of this flight as we wing our way to Detroit. We push back from the gate and taxi to the runway. The pilot throttles up to full and as the engines scream we accelerate down the runway, the nose rises a bit and the plane takes to the sky and climbs. I am not sure what I was expecting but all in all quite without incident. I bit of a drop in my stomach as we first left the ground because it feels a bit like you are falling forward which, technically I suppose you are. As we gain altitude we bank around to get on the heading we were assigned and the flight actually becomes very smooth and rather comfortable. A little over an hour later I experience my first decent which can be a bit unnerving. We are flying along happily and suddenly we are going noticeably slower and beginning to noticeably descend. Not fast and we appeared to be fully under control but never having flown I was a bit startled by it. It took about 20 minutes to descend and maneuver to the approach path requested by the tower in Detroit and we finally came in over the end of the runway ans seconds later a slight jolt and then a heavy deceleration as the thrust reversers were engaged. We got to the gate and disembarked the plane and I will leave you now as I start the 3 hour layover before the longest part of my journey.