A flight story

Flying is always an adventure. This trip was no different.

My first flight, a 2 hour jump from Phoenix to Dallas, was an early morning adventure in humility. It was Thanksgiving day, the flight was full, and I of course got the middle seat of the very last row.... between two gentleman who I would refer to as 'rotund'. The view out of the window was the side of an engine, which was loud enough to drown out my attempts at listening to my MP3 player. The flight attendant was apparently unhappy at having to work on Thanksgiving, and had no problems making this known to the passengers. Oh yeah, and there was turbulence. Bad enough that the captain climbed an extra 10K feet to get out of it.

 

Enjoyable is not quite the word I would use... but it was entertaining. And it definitely made my hour layover in Dallas seem dreamy.

 

While waiting in Dallas I watched a woman play with her carry-on luggage. Which happened to be a little Daschund puppy. Talk about cute! Oh, and you see the drawing in the ID-Tag holder? Totally drawn by a little boy as I watched. Awesome:

 

From Dallas it was a 1 hour hop to Ft. Smith. I was fortunate enough to get a window seat on this flight, but was unfortunate enough to be seated next to a Korean woman who didn't speak ANY engrish. This, in and of itself, wasn't that bad except for the fact that this woman had carry-on luggage of a different sort. A young child.

 

WHO WAS OUT OF CONTROL.

 

In the span of an hour I was on the receiving end of small kicks to the kidneys, a shower of Captain Crunch cereal, and a few solid hits from various plastic toys which were hurled at the speed of sound. The mother? Yeah... she didn't seem to care. At one point she just set him down in the aisle to roam around at will. Apparently this was easier than dealing with him.

 

As we began our descent for landing the mother had an apparent concern that she would be sick. I say this because she haphazardly tossed her son onto my lap without a word, and took off running to the back of the plane. She came back to her seat after we had landed, and packed up all of her belongings (leaving behind a few toys and lots of cereal) before finally relieving me of the now-complacent toddler.

 

I made it all in one piece though. And man, that Ft. Smith regional airport's bathrooms sure were nice!