The year is 1961 - the heyday of jet travel has begun, and Christine's dream has just come true. A small-town girl from the Midwest, she has been accepted by TWA to train as an air hostess, and she is ecstatic at the prospect of becoming a part of the glamorous life of traveling the globe. Up and Away - Back in the Day is a humorous chronicle of her struggles to fit into her new, sophisticated Swinging Sixties world, from the day she arrives in Kansas City for training (TWA has lost her luggage) through the next ten years of her experiences, both on and off the airplane. As she wings her way around the world looking for romance and adventure, she is confronted with combative passengers, non-routine flights, romantic disasters, and several cockroach-infested apartments. Her exploits are presented in a series of monthly letters to her conservative parents, in which she relates the facts as they would want to hear them and concurrent letters to her best friend from college, to whom she tells "the rest of the story."