I did San Francisco to Hawaii in the A2A Stratocruiser. Quite an interesting flight. I did a flight plan where I took off on a specific heading and turned two degrees south every hour to do a great circle route. Real world weather, and I had only a vague idea of the winds aloft. No map, no GPS. In the end, I was less than two degrees off on my initial heading, close enough to pick up the VOR on the west-most island. No time compression, about eight hours, and I did use the Strat's autopilot. I even had a cabin pressurization failure about 2/3 of the way there and was a bit worried about having enough fuel. Overall, an exciting flight.
I seem to remember flying back, and doing a trip from New York to Paris, but they weren't as memorable as that first Hawaiian trip. I may have done a second Hawaii trip. These were right after the Stratocruiser was introduced.
My typical flight now days is around two hours, but I did one a few days ago in Manfred Jahn's C-47/DC-3 from Boeing Field in Washington (KBFI) to Mena, Arkansas (KMEZ), 1500 miles which took 10 hours (logbook says 9.8, my longest single flight ever) flying VOR to VOR, no time compression, no GPS, no map, no autopilot, and landed with 14% of my fuel. I had done weather planning with windy.com. A DC-3 can't go above 12,500 feet with passengers, so I was dodging clouds and weather and fighting ice. An hour and a half into the flight my vertical speed indicator froze for ninety minutes, then was up for another ninety minutes then froze again for the rest of the trip. I never had time to admire the scenery: I was quite busy the entire time. This was a recreation of a Buffalo Airways flight of a DC-4, I believe, from Boeing where it was refurbished to Mena where it was painted.
Air travel couldn't have been much fun in the DC-3 days. I had the seat belt sign on and off for most of the flight. But as a pilot I enjoyed it.
I am contemplating a flight from Panama to the Galapagos in the A2A Cherokee. Just for fun.
Hook