SchizoFrenetic

After experience much travel drama, bloggers Laurel and Sonia and Ree thought we should come up with contest featuring stories of surviving a really effed-up travel experience. My entry is below.

See details for the contest at Ree’s blog, The Hotfessional. Yes, there are prizes.

I spent my final semester of college in Australia. While I would describe it as 6 of the best months of my life, I could not travel on a plane without incident.

Making my initial trek from NJ to Australia, I scheduled a 24-hour layover to visit a college-friend. My luggage didn’t make the initial flight; after several panicked phone calls with the airline, they arrived for the second leg of the trip.

I hope to someday be able to afford plane seats with actual leg room; until then, coach gets me there. The trip from Los Angeles to Melbourne included a stop in Auckland for those travelers going to New Zealand. I had the window seat (in an attempt to make sleep more likely) and sat beside an elderly couple.

A few hours outside of New Zealand we hit some pretty wicked turbulance. The seat belt sign in turned on and passengers start buckling up. The woman next to me is not looking particularly well, and her husband is frantically searching for something. The flight attendants are making their way through the aisles and ask him to sit. He explains his wife is diabetic and her blood sugar is clearly off, and he can’t find her pills. . . a flight attendant begins to help him search through their carry-on luggage in an effort to find the missing pills. The turbulence gets worse — I am glad seat belts are invented.

The woman next to me is looking worse by the minute, and before her pills are found, she falls into a diabetic seizure. (I am now wishing that I had taken a first aid course of some sort before getting on a plane to travel half way around the world.) The situation is now more dire and flight attendants are clustering around our row of seats, trying to figure out what to do. The husband and I are trying to restrain the woman so that she doesn’t clock us; flight attendants find there is no doctor on our flight–just dandy.

The husband explains she needs sugar immediately. Haven’t we all seen this episode on some television programming with the crashing diabetic who is quickly rushed orange juice with table sugar stirred in? Not our flight attendants, who return with a paper cup of maple syrup. Turbulence + diabetic seizure + maple syrup = a sticky mess for all parties involved. Fortunately, it does the trick and the woman gains control of herself.

The flight attendants aren’t sure what to do. The husband and I check on his wife to make sure she’s not about to relapse. Once all parties believe the woman is stable for the rest of the flight and the turbulence subsides, the flight attendants ask me if I’d like to switch seats so that the couple can have more room. I gladly agree, having had more than enough excitement for one trip.

My thanks for my seizure assistance? They seat me next to a Canadian with the most atrocious body odor ever experienced in an enclosed space.

While I wanted to believe that my plane drama was behind me. Flight incidents continued through the duration of my stay in Australia.

Prior to leaving the States, I booked my flight to Western Australia for spring break, knowing it was my golden opportunity to do some traveling. I booked flights on Ansett Airlines, which went bankrupt and shut down about a week before I was set to fly west. Quantas, the only other domestic carrier, now had travelers by the gonads and raised the prices of a number of flights.

(Australia struggled with the 50% cut in available domestic flights, literally overnight. The best expression of the nation’s overwhelming frustration was written on a chalkboard in a cafe I passed through — “The definition of frustration: a terrorist an Ansett ticket.” This airline shut down occurred just weeks after 9/11, and anyone holding an Ansett ticket was not going anywhere.)

Fortunately, Quantas agreed to honor Ansett tickets if one could find an open seat on a plane. In order to get to Perth, I had to take a train from Melbourne to Adelaide and then catch a flight to Perth. (In rescheduling my return flight to Melbourne, I had no choice but to miss 2 days of classes — darn!)

I spent Christmas in Sydney and had to go back to Melbourne to pack my bags for a flight back to the US on New Year’s Day. I got back to the airport for my return flight to Melbourne early because I was tired of dragging my duffel bag around Sydney. To pass the time, I picked up a book in one of the kiosks and planted myself down in front of the gate listed on the TV monitor. The book I picked my have been plastic-wrapped with a sticker noting it was not for consumption by minors. (Don’t judge me for reading erotica in an airport — I look at avocados in an entirely different way now, but that’s another story for another time.) A few hours later I look up and realize my flight is gone from the monitor, and this gate is empty. I’m concerned. . . and then I hear an announcement paging ME to my flight, which boarded at the other end of the terminal. The flight was waiting for me, and the only excuse I had was I was lost in a “good” book. I got to be that person that everyone hated for holding up the flight — evils eyes abounded as I got on that plane.

Flight fraccas continued with my return flight to the US. Beverages were served at regular intervals to those who stayed awake on the overnight flight. Each time a different flight attendant worked his or her way through the aisles. Each time the flight attendant got to me, he or she managed to dump my requested water in my lap. By the third visit I was very wary of the flight attendant and inquired jokingly, after yet another lapful of water, as to weather I was being targeted for a particular reason. After this third attendant finished her rotation through the aisles, the head attendant approached me — to apologize. He offered me a very lovely pack of travel size toiletries that were only given to Business or First class customer. Even though I had a great sense of humor about having water dumped on me repeatedly, I highly appreciated the gesture.

It’s been a number of years since I’ve had the opportunity to do some big traveling, but despite my experiences on planes, I don’t doubt the amazing experiences waiting for me just after the next flight.