Ha! BTW, Jmoose, my airplane ride was far worse than the car ride that day last spring - I didn't know if I was going to make it to the wedding I attended... Talk about feeling like you've been pulsed through a Cuisinart for hours on end... Honestly, don't know how pilots and attendants do that for a living...
But this makes me think, my first airplane ride ever was as a teen in the early 70's, in a DC10, iirc, it was loud... But exciting as it was my first time flying. My parents flew me home from a junior year summer away at great expense to them. My family was not a globe trotting family by any means.
As I am just a couple years younger than Sylvia, this makes me think and remember how rare it was that anyone just upped and got on an airplane back then- (My next, smoother, airplane ride, mid eighties).
So, did Sylvia just up and fly away? Really doubtful. And I assume her family still has her original passport back as a child traveling here from Germany. Or, the updated one from her trip to Bermuda. ... Bermuda, makes me wonder...
She could have gone into Canada with just a driver's license. I did so myself on a trip in the late 70's - no questions asked other than purpose of trip. I didn't get a passport until the late 80's for my first international trip.
So, this leaves bus, train, car, or boat. For Sylvia, it is the boat question that I wonder about. It is the question of wondering who she knew; circle of friends, circle of fiancé friends, circle of Wagner friends, circle of neighborhood next to the marina friends? -Access to and from station island by boat.
That she just upped and ran into a serial killer that night seems a rare possibility. So what else could have happened?