Back in 1975, a friend and co-worker had a license, and invited me along on an hour-long sightseeing & practice flight he'd reserved a plane for at Santa Monica Airport. I'll have to check this, but as I recall, that was in the afternoon of Christmas Eve in 1975, a perfectly gorgeous day in Southern California. That ride was the greatest thrill, and I regaled him with questions on what it would take for me to learn how to fly. My parents were visiting from Ohio that week, and I'm afraid I talked their ears off about that flight the rest of the day. It took me another year before I finally had the chance to jump in, but I took the ground school and then the flying lessons starting in 1977, and a year later I had my piece of paper.
I was living over the hill in L.A., but I did all of this at Van Nuys Airport because the huge company I worked for had divisions in the Valley, and one of their many extracurricular benefits was a flying club through which I met the most wonderful people and private pilots.
Before I was to move and go through other everyday life changes that saw me eventually giving up the flying activities, I had decided that my very next "upgrade" would be to go out to some lake or wherever it was available and take lessons in a seaplane to get that rating added to my license. That didn't happen, but I had very much looked forward to it. Weirdly, though, to this day I have never been in a seaplane.
