Since this week kicks off the most hellish travel time of the year, I figured this would be a good place to reminisce about our, ahem, “fondest” travel memories. As someone who flies a fair amount for work (by my count, 15-20 trips a year, all domestic), I have my fair share of fun stories, including:
- The time my wife and I flew with our six-month old kitten to my parents in Albany and got stuck in Newark airport for six hours. The poor little guy didn’t go to the bathroom one time the whole trip, all 14-hours of it (even though we tried in a corner of the airport). Naturally, Newark opened up the pet relief area shortly after this. To his credit, our kitten took it like a champ and we had a great trip with him (and no, we have never flown with him again).
- Flying with our 14-month old last year, when he threw up on the car ride to the airport and again during our initial ascent. Thankfully the flight attendants and the person next to us were cool about it. Again, this was heading to Albany.
- On my first international trip ever, my bag got lost, so the first thing I did in London was go shopping. The bag never showed up the whole trip, and I incurred a massive hotel phone bill checking into it. US Airways (may they burn in hell) finally found it a month later, at which point FedEx left it on the wrong porch.
- When I moved back from Taiwan, I got food poisoning the morning I was leaving, had to stop at an overpass and throw up on my way to the airport, threw up in the airport, on the plane, in my layover in Osaka and on the plane again (making it to the bathroom every time!). I had mentioned to my brother in a call that I was sick but, when I got to my parents place, they asked why I looked so pale. He forgot to mention it to them.
- The time I sat across the aisle from an old man reading “50 Shades of Grey” who would quietly go “mmmm” to himself every few minutes like he was about to eat a tasty sandwich.
- Lastly, I have been delayed for the following reasons: every seat on the plane being full except for the pilots, the President being in Seattle for fundraisers, catering forgetting to put food on the plane (that was last week), somebody realizing when they sat down that they put something in their checked luggage they weren’t supposed to (same flight), a plane coming up short of the runway in Orange County and landing on the 405 instead.
Those are just a smidgen of my travel stories. What are yours?