RICK HELMS: TRAVELER

I love to travel. Seeing new places, especially places with a lot of history, is one of my major passions.

It seems as if I've always had periodic fits of 'happy feet', episodes of wanderlust in which I just want to get into the car and go.

Until about twenty years ago, my ability to travel was heavily limited by a case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder courtesy of my days working in radio news. On September 11, 1974, Eastern Airlines Flight 212, a McDonnell-Douglas DC-9 with 84 people on board, crashed in a heavy fog about two miles short of Douglas International Airport in Charlotte. I had just finished a six-hour on-air shift at a Charlotte radio station, and the News Director called and ordered me to take a portable recorder and head out to the crash site near Beam and Shopton Roads off Highway 49. Among the 84 passengers and crew, 71 were killed on impact. Three more would die of their injuries over the next month.

If you've ever watched the movie Knowing with Nicholas Cage, you saw the depiction of an air crash that is probably as realistic as any I've seen--outside the real thing. I don't talk much about what I saw that day, except to say that as a result I didn't get within a quarter mile of an airplane for over almost twenty more years. Most of my travel was limited to those places I could easily reach in a day or two by car.

For my wife Elaine's fortieth birthday, I decided to bite the bit, and I scheduled a trip to Montego Bay, Jamaica. I consulted with a friend at work--a psychiatrist--and he gave me several tabs of Valium to help me get on the plane and survive the trip.

I've probably flown fifty or sixty times since then, and I've discovered that benzodiazepines are my very good friends, and really do help make the flying part more bearable. I've even reached the point where I can fly for short distances--say to New York--without medication at all, or as I refer to it, "bareback".

My newfound ability to board an airliner has opened up the world for travel, and Elaine and I have spent a lot of time since then in other countries, enjoying exotic locales and ancient history. This is a wide, wonderful world, and I am very glad to have been able to see so much of it.

On this page and the links to it, I've posted pictures of some of the places we've visited. In the future, we want to add the British Isles, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, the Holy Land, Budapest, Scandinavia, Holland, and others before we start going back to hit our favorites again for a deeper dip in their cultures. Hope you enjoy these pics and stories. See you on the road!

 

VENICE (under construction)

ROME  (under construction)

MONACO (under construction)

FLORENCE (under construction)

POMPEII (under construction)

ATHENS  (under construction)

MYKONOS (under construction)

SANTORINI (under construction)

CORFU (under construction)

CROATIA (under construction)

PARIS (under construction)

ALASKA (under construction)

CANADA (under construction)

BERMUDA (under construction)

MORE TO COME!!!