The Young and The Restless | Plane and simple; a perfect weekend winging it

When you have an aviation-obsessed child in the family and an easily accessible airport only a couple of kilometres away from home, you tend to take him at least one out of every 400 times he asks to go — maybe more for your own sanity break than to satisfy his wants.

That’s how we ended up with this average.

You probably think I’m exaggerating.

I wish I was.

Imagine how thrilled he was when the weekend flew around and there were two aviation-related events in the Goulburn Valley; an open day at Shepparton Airport and the Valley Radio Flyers Mammoth Scale Fly-in at its Karramomus flying field.

By some miracle, it also happened to be a weekend we had few other commitments and could make it to both.

Imagine if we couldn’t make it to either.

While you’re doing that, I’ll be breathing a sigh of relief that we could.

Perhaps the best part of finding the two events that floated his boat (or lit his jets) and would entertain him all weekend was that they cost next to nothing.

The airport open day was free and the fly-in was just five bucks for anyone over 14.

I don’t think any cheaper entertainment exists.

As with everything though, there are other opportunities to detach from the contents of your purse if your will to resist isn’t strong enough.

For example, if we’re at the beach, I find it hard not to stop at the ice-cream vendor and grab the kids an ice-cream.

If we’re at a tourist attraction, I can’t bypass the opportunity in the gift shop to grab a fridge magnet for our collection.

I’ll sometimes even buy the ridiculously overpriced souvenir photos from an experience (especially if it was forbidden for us to capture our own photographic evidence we did the thing).

I always overspend on holidays because I don’t like to return to the same places when there are so many other places in Australia and the world to see and explore.

So, I’m always swayed by knowing we may never get back to where we are at the time and, in that case, we’d better do the things we can only do there, while we’re there.

Generally, my whole life is a bit YOLO like that.

I’m constantly torn between pumping excess money into my mortgage, or using it to travel and buy memories through experiences and whatnot.

The latter option normally wins because in my head I know any one of us could die tomorrow.

What’s the point in paying my house off quicker and not seeing or doing much in the decade it takes to do that if we weren’t around at the end of it?

Our kids are only our kids for less than two decades. I don’t want to bore them while I’m dodging interest.

Yet, I don’t feel like any of the money I spend is wasted.

I still love a bargain and I’ll save money where I can.

I’ve spoken many times about packing picnics and drinks to avoid paying retail prices for them, or staying in budget accommodation because we’re only there to wash and sleep.

So seeing as it was inevitable I was going to book a joy flight sometime soon for my son, there was no way I was going to pass up a $50 open day special to do it.

As evidenced by the 2.5-hour wait to take our flight, there were many others who couldn’t resist either.

We thought we’d be going up in a small Cessna with four seats.

By some stroke of luck, or maybe the facilitators’ attempt to churn through their lengthy list of waiting passengers, we ended up in a 10-seater Piper PA-31 Chieftain aircraft; the plane my son tells me is his 10th favourite of the countless planes that exist.

His day was made before we even boarded.

It got even better once we were in the air, taking in a bird’s eye view of our home and all its surrounds.

Sure, these days we get a lot of aerial images, with the popularity of drones on the rise.

They’re cool shots, but actually being up there on the craft rather than still grounded looking at a viewfinder is quite different.

What I thought about while sky-high (when I wasn’t concentrating on controlling my breathing to avoid the rising vomit escaping) was how pilots know the lay of the land in such a different way to us ground-dwelling species.

They can see us mowing our back lawns and swimming in our private swimming pools.

They can see the network of bush tracks and how neatly they meet, in stark contrast to how higgledy-piggledy it feels on wheels at ground level among the trees.

They can see where the rivers run and how they twist and turn; the direct path the railway line cuts; the sheer area a factory takes up by looking at the flat, wide expanse of its roof, adjacent to much smaller buildings.

Like emotionally having empathy and the ability to see things from others’ points of view to understand, with perspective changing everything, people who spend lots of time in the (low) air have the privilege of understanding a few different angles.

So while I still have no desire to learn to fly myself, I sure am looking forward to my flying-obsessed son flying me somewhere, some day.

Just as soon as I get that mile-high nausea sorted.