I never knew that I had a secret desire to fly in a biplane, but last Sunday, I found myself riding in one.  My town has an air museum and last weekend was its open house.  I almost forgot about it, but while I was mowing my lawn, I noticed a biplane flying overhead.  I was committed to other things that day, so, on Sunday, I wandered across town to the museum, located next to the airport.

The parking lot was the lawn in front of the museum building.  There were single winged planes parked near the runway as the biplane flew overhead.   I walked to the pop-up canopy offering plane rides, as people lolled around, opting for shade wherever they could find it.

For a Benjamin, I could have a 20-minute biplane flight over town.  It was more than I thought about paying for a cheap thrill.  Nevertheless, I dug deep into my pocket for the cash.   There was a half hour wait for my ride.  It didn’t feel real to me until the Stearman biplane landed and coasted to a stop, engine running, while the ground helper, a young pilot herself, assisted the last passenger out of the cockpit and helped me climb into the front seat of this vintage tandem aircraft.  The pilot, seated behind me, waved her away and we taxied down the runway.

Even though I wasn’t handling the controls, I smiled like a kid with her first driver’s license as we became airborne!  I could recognize a strip mall not far from downtown, but couldn’t identify my house from the air.  I saw a deep, crevasse of a quarry somewhere that made me want to find it after we landed.   The mountains were even more glorious from the air, and, despite subdivisions sprouting up in the community, there are still many forests engulfing the area.

The best part of all was wearing the old-time leather aviator’s helmet. It made me feel like I was going back in time to an era where flight was still a novelty.  Even though I was just a passenger, I could feel the spirit of adventure that Amelia Earhart may have felt when she ventured into the sky.  Donning that well-worn leather helmet somehow inducted me into the sisterhood of aviatrixes.

I wore sunglasses, but left my cell phone on the ground.  Traveling 100mph, if I leaned just a bit too far to take a picture, my phone would have been airborne, too.  The airframe was in the way to take pictures anyhow, so I tried to remember as much of the view as I could in my mind’s eye.

I had flown in two-seater planes years ago, but in an open cockpit craft, when the pilot started our descent, it felt like we were dropping out of the sky. The pilot was capable—it just scared the hell out of me and I tried not to scream on the way down.   My trademark queasy stomach let me know it wasn’t happy either.  I was thankful that I followed my intuition to skip lunch before coming to the airport.

Something about that flight in that vintage biplane, built so many decades ago, nudged my true self to take another step forward.  I found myself less resistant to working on my projects.  I feel more contented having had a “stepping out of the box” experience.  For some of us, it has been a long time since we’ve had a new experience, and we have lost touch with the inner kid in us who loved to try new things.  It doesn’t have to cost much.  It may not have to cost anything.  From trying a food that we have never tasted before, to going to a park or store near in our own hometown that we have not visited before, new experiences invite our true selves to emerge.