Flying and light posting

Posting will be light this week as I am attending the 2008 RLG European Partners meeting later in the week. I go to Paris via a meeting in Ottawa tomorrow ….. Too much flying 🙁
I was traveling through National in Washington DC a while ago. I was tired. It was early in the morning and I was coming off a bumpy and cramped commuter flight from Columbus, Ohio (purportedly within an hour and a half’s flying time of 56% of the US population, I seem to remember reading somewhere).
I passed by a display of retro Pan Am flight bags, proud with that iconic logo. They were on sale. Since then, it seems that I have been seeing retro flight bags everywhere.
As a young child, the logo was very familiar to me, and not a little magical. I had an uncle who worked with Pan Am, and for a while there were always bags or other items around. It was a time when flying was exciting and even exotic. And Pan Am seemed more exciting than the rest. I notice that Wikipedia describes Pan Am as a “cultural icon of the 20th Century”.
Indeed, the flight bag, and that logo in particular, seem to belong to a different era. And it is perhaps now, when the excitement has been squeezed from most flying, that the logo can come to life again as an emblem of the glamor of an experience that has mostly faded away.
Note: logo copied from the Wikipedia page about the image. Note the fair use rationale.