1) Every time you read about long flights, you hear you should get up frequently and walk around the plane. This ignores two problems:
a) All the other passengers and crew look at you suspiciously, like you’re a terrorist or something, just because you have to get up, stretch, and go to the bathroom repeatedly; and
b) Haven’t they noticed there is no room to walk anywhere? What do they think you are — the size of an amoeba?
2) Why don’t they serve food any longer? Don’t they know starving people develop severe personality disorders?
3) No, guy in the next row, your golf game is not terribly interesting. Please shut up about it.
4) When you look down at your unexercised feet, you notice your ankles have become bulbous. Even your toes are obese.
5) OK, so they finally serve a meal. Big deal. You call this food?
6) Why is it that every single other person can sleep on a flight, but you cannot?
7) If you had wanted to see He’s Just Not That Into You, you would have seen it at a movie theater — not at 30,000 feet.
8) You wonder what the record is for going to the bathroom on a transatlantic flight. Surely, you must be approaching it.
9) You try to recall how many circles of hell Dante came up with and which one you might be in right now.
10) They say travel changes you. Agreed. However, flights of more than 10 hours change you into someone you don’t particularly like. Since when you do have the personality of Basil Fawlty? Since the eighth hour, as it turns out.
11) Just one more flight. What could be worse than that? One more flight! Can you do it? Yes, barely.
12) Here’s what could be worse than one more flight: The DFW Airport shuts down. They cancel your last flight, after you’ve been traveling for 24 hours and look, roughly, like a refugee from a war-torn country. Dante, in his pre-air travel era, just didn’t come up with enough circles.
(Copyright 2009 by Ruth Pennebaker)
I think it’s kind of like having a baby. Right after you think, “That’s it. I’m never doing that again.” In a few weeks you begin to forget the pain, and at some point you are ready to have another (or book another ticket). I’m going to New Zealand in November. I dread the flight (13 hours) but the reward when I get there is great.
Welcome back darling you’ve been missed by many at the castle….
And yet the natty no. 8 emoticon in sunglasses really, really enjoyed the flight. 🙂
Right now, I’m feeling as if I never want to travel anywhere again. And that damned little emoticon can’t be erased.