We were supposed to be in Nantucket.
The plan was simple: fly through JFK, connect to Nantucket, and arrive in time to begin the week. Instead, our flight was delayed. Then delayed again. And again.
Six hours later, it was canceled.
There is nothing aspirational about sitting in an airport while the departure time keeps moving farther into the future. A canceled flight is inconvenient, expensive and deeply annoying. We would have preferred for everything to go according to plan.
But travel does not always cooperate. In fact, as seasoned travelers, we expect the unexpected.
Once it became clear that we were not getting to Nantucket that night, we had a choice. We could be upset about the trip that was impossible, or we could become curious about was actually possible.
So we checked into the TWA Hotel, conveniently located at JetBlue’s Terminal 5 at JFK.
The hotel occupies Eero Saarinen’s former TWA Flight Center, one of the great monuments of postwar American architecture. Completed in 1962, the building was designed to embody the movement and exhilaration of flight. Its soaring concrete roof opens above like a parachute. Its corridors curve toward the gates like arteries. Even standing still, the building appears to be going somewhere.
The terminal arrived at a pivotal moment in aviation history. It was built for the Lockheed Constellation—the propeller-driven aircraft known as the “Connie”—that was memorialized on the cover of Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me. The Connie was quickly becoming obsolete as faster and larger passenger jets gained traction. Saarinen’s terminal was built for a world that was disappearing. It embodies the ebullient optimism of the Jet Age and the belief that air travel was about to remake the world.
It did.
Today, the restored terminal-turned-hotel leans fully into the glamour of the Jet Age. There are red carpets, curved banquettes, vintage uniforms, mechanical departure boards and photographs of the years when people dressed for a flight as though they were attending a special occasion. Exhibits honor Saarinen, whose architecture gave physical form to the excitement of travel, and Howard Hughes, whose long association with TWA helped turn the airline into an international force.
The hotel bar’s cocktail lounge is a beautifully restored 1958 Lockheed Constellation that had a journey that made ours seem tame in comparison. First it carried TWA passengers, then when the Connie as no longer a passenger aircraft it hauled cargo. Later, it was used as an Alaskan bush plane, then it became a drug-running plane in the 1980s. Abandoned in Honduras, it was later rescued and brought to Maine where it sat on a tarmac for thirty years before making the long trip by truck to JFK (and famously stuck for three weeks on the Throg’s Neck Bridge).
We climbed aboard and ordered Negronis.
It was not Nantucket. But sitting inside a plane that had crossed oceans, pivoted careers, survived abandonment and somehow ended up serving cocktails on the tarmac at JFK, it was difficult to be too upset by a canceled flight.
Instead, we were reminded of something that is easy to forget when travel becomes routine: air travel is still a wonder.
In a matter of hours, we can move between cities, countries, climates and cultures. We can reach islands that were once genuinely remote. We can have breakfast in one place and dinner thousands of miles away. The process is imperfect because almost every ambitious human undertaking is imperfect. Weather changes. Machines require attention. Crews time out. Plans unravel.
Travel asks us to surrender a certain amount of control.
That surrender is not always pleasant. Flexibility does not mean pretending that inconvenience is enjoyable, or that every disruption is secretly a gift. Sometimes a canceled flight is simply a canceled flight.
But once something is beyond our control, rigidity rarely improves it. Curiosity sometimes does.
One of our core beliefs at Res Ipsa is that every person should travel as far as they can, as often as they can. We believe travel matters because it opens minds and hearts. We believe beauty is not trivial, that every product should have a story and that human beings are hard-wired for narrative.
Those beliefs apply not only to where we go, but to how we respond when the journey changes.
Travel is not merely the successful execution of an itinerary. It is the people you meet, the places you notice and the stories you collect along the way. Occasionally, the experience you remember most begins with the sentence: This was not the plan.
We reached Nantucket the next day. Nothing was lost. Much was gained.
But the night before, we had a good meal, drank a Negroni inside a former passenger plane and reconnected with our appreciation for the astonishing human achievement that made the journey possible in the first place.
We reached Nantucket the next day. The plan failed. The trip did not.
Our Brand is Travel.