Dear Airports

You suck.

Love,
Anna

Last weekend (the 11th of July-ish) I took a short jaunty vacation up to Seattle to meet up with some friends.  I had a fantastic time, got almost no sleep (night owl friends plus 2 hour time difference meant going to bed when my body thought it was 5am… and still waking up when my body thought it was 9am), and managed to pick up a real humdinger of a cold in the airport on the way up.

I also had some of the most colorful airplane experiences on those flights.

Flying from Houston to Seattle on Southwest is a direct flight with one stop in either Phoenix or Denver where you don’t get off the plane but where about half the plane exchanges with new people for the second leg of the trip.  This makes the trip a great deal longer, but also a good bit cheaper.

For the first leg (Houston to Phoenix) I was sitting next to a sleeping rocker dude with some seriously awesome dreadlocks and an older man who reminded me pleasantly of my dad (in a non-creepy way).  However, that meant I was sitting in the dreaded middle seat, and even though I accomplished a great deal of knitting, the lack of armrest/legroom/place to put my head and snooze got to me.

So I tempted fate and swapped seats, moving up a few rows and snagging a nice aisle seat during the exchange of people who didn’t really want to go to Seattle on that particular trip.

My tempting of fate did, in fact, bite me in the arse.  The people that ended up sitting in the window and middle seats seemed quite pleasant as they got on the plane(though one of them was screaming in his iPhone as he asked me if he could sit by the window).  This illusion was broken after both of them had consumed two drinks without having any food.  I was then subjected to said screaming man’s pictures of his (admittedly awesome) house, yard, greenhouse, motorcycle, campsites, touring pictures, and any other pictures he’d taken.

One more drink into each of them resulted in his going off on a rant about how men weren’t real men anymore, and what was wrong with women in the world (serious barefoot and pregnant vibe at this point) and the woman between us cracking obscene comments (“you can’t teach a d*1do to mow the lawn”) and smacking me on the shoulder in an attempt to get some sort of agreement out of me.  She was, I think, too drunk to notice that I was tired, had been in airports/planes for nearly 8 hours, am relatively shy, and would really have liked to just get back to my book, thanks.

THAT flight couldn’t end fast enough.

Oh – that was the flight where the people in the row behind me proceeded to make all sorts of awful and disgusting bodily noises as they dealt with whatever version of the plague that they happened to pass on to me.

By Sunday the combination of talking to people (GASP!), lack of sleep, and IMPENDING DOOM of chest cold had me squeaking.

The flight home was entirely uneventful (the two screaming, incredibly sunburned infants that were making our lives in the staging area miserable both passed out within 5 minutes of boarding the plane) though didn’t help much with my being sick, and I spent most of last week holed up with cups of lemon and honey tea and bowls of chicken soup.

I’m finally feeling better now though (yay) and am back to walking the walk again.  And, you know, talking like an adult woman instead of a 12 year old boy.