All For Love

Jonas was in the zone.

He had been searching for his pilot’s licence for the past 20 minutes, but to no avail. Sitting at a small kitchenette table in their rented suite, sipping her morning tea, Jolana watched with amusement as her husband muttered to himself, totally oblivious of her presence, as he crawled underneath their hotel room bed for the third time; desperately trying to find the document she knew was not there. Mainly because she had hid it on purpose.

They had arrived in Tofino BC for the first time two days ago, and booked a room at the Wickaninnish Inn. Today they would be checking out and flying across the mountains to Campbell River on the eastern shore of the island.

As she watched her husband’s legs protruding from beneath the bed, Jolana’s mind drifted to the past. It was almost six months to the day since retiring as Director of Flight Operations for the Czech Republic’s National Carrier, Czech Airlines. After 25 years of postings throughout Europe and the Middle East, she had felt the time was right to begin enjoying life at a slower pace.

A month after retirement, accompanied by her two closest friends, Jolana decided to take a road trip from her home town of Prague, to Germany. The time spent on the road was great until they were just outside the eastern outskirts of Berlin, where their car decided it could go no further. After contacting roadside assistance, they were met a short time later by a local representative who took them into Berlin. His name was Jonas.

At first she thought him to be a bit too intense. But as she and her friends chatted with him on the drive in, they found out he too was recently retired. He had flown transport aircraft in the German Air Force for 25 years. That revelation gave her added insight into his personality.

Jolana would never have thought such a regimented, orderly person would be interesting to her; given her somewhat mischievous and carefree nature.

“Jo? Jolana?”

Jolana stirred from her memories and found Jonas, his head and shoulders sticking out from under the bed, looking up at her with a knowing look on his face.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where my pilot’s license is, would you?”

“License? What license?” She replied, feigning innocence and trying not to smile.

Jonas took all of this in stride. In the five months he had known her. He had moved beyond bemused tolerance to unabashed admiration. When he first met her on that German roadside less than half a year ago, her spontaneity and mischievousness ran counter to his ordered and logical way of thinking. He had mistakenly assumed, Jolana and her friends were just your typical free-spirited, holiday makers. When he discovered she recently ran the FlightOps department of a major European Airline, he found himself readjusting his thinking and viewing her in a totally new light.

That unexpected encounter out on the Autobahn, had turned even more unusual, when not two months after their first meeting, while visiting her in Prague, she had proposed to him. She must have taken his stunned look as affirmation, because within a month of that request, they were married in a quiet civic ceremony.

The second clue to her ongoing penchant for surprises, came on their wedding day. Jolana had presented a gold-lined, black velvet box containing a silver key to him. As it turned out, the key accessed an exclusive private hangar at EuroJet’s Intercontinental FBO at Prague’s Vodochody Airport.

Inside was a brand new Czech Let L-410 Turbolet; a twin-engine transport aircraft; converted for long-range flight. Having become familiar with some of the history about his days in the military as a transport pilot, Jolana had somehow acquired the 100th aircraft off LET’s assembly line as her wedding gift to him. She has never revealed how she pulled that off.

Thay have been travelling the world in it ever since.

As Jonas crawled out from under the bed, he smiled back at her, confident in the fact his license was not lost, but quite safe. He also knew visiting Campbell River would just be another opportunity for her to hide something else, or surprise him once again. Either way, because of her, retirement would never be boring.