I used to be a better flyer than I am now. I'm not too sure why, but let me try and figure it out.
In 2006, on the morning when me, my wife and our son were supposed to leave Dublin to fly to England, there was a bomb threat at the airport.
Lovely. Just what we needed. Three hours standing in line with a two year old.
After a wonderful week in England it was another three hour wait in line for our flight back to Vancouver.
After standing for three hours to check our bags, then having our shoes inspected for bombs (the only ones they might find at that stage were stink bombs), and inspecting my son's bottle of milk for explosives, scanning my nether regions for anything else that might explode, hauling me out of the security lineup to swab my hands for explosive residue causing everyone to stare at me like I was a criminal, finding several bottles of water in our carry-on bags after we told security we didn't have any liquids, and then pronouncing my name wrong when they welcomed me on board you could understand why I was a bit shifty.
Now I consider myself to be a so-so flyer, but with all the checks and standing in line it doesn't help the experience one bit. Neither do the odd-shaped and narrow seats on the plane.
However, I get on the plane and do what I have to do.
I might not dislike it so much if the seats were in any way appropriate for sitting in, especially after the security hell I just went through. Yeah the seats may be OK for an hour or so, as long as you don't weigh more than 180 pounds and if you have really short legs for your height, but if you have to go on any sort of a longer flight and are of average or larger size it is a real pain, in the neck, the legs, the butt and the back.
Trying to get comfortable for a transcontinental flight is like jumping into a bag of cats and having someone play the soundtrack from Cujo.
I could probably handle the tiny leg room and the arm rests leaving red marks on my ribs, but it is my total inability to sleep on a plane that kills me.
To make matters worse, when I am on these flights I am accompanied by my wife and nine-year-old son, neither of whom seems to have enough room in their seats even though both of them is only about half my size.
On the way back from England - after everyone had ploughed their way through the wonderfully appetizing airplane food and had subsequently fallen asleep - me, being the insomniac that I am, was getting more and more agitated because I was so uncomfortable in my seat and there was absolutely no way I could fall asleep.
So I got up and decided to walk around the plane for a while.
Up one aisle down the other. Back up the aisle and back down the other on occasion making faces at the odd child that was still awake. I'm not sure what the cabin crew thought especially when I started stretching at the back of the plane.
On about my 17th lap I thought I should probably go back to my seat as the cabin crew were starting to give me weird looks and I thought I saw one of them reach for the handcuffs.
By the time we got back to Vancouver I think I had walked roughly 7,000 of the 7,343 kilometres.
When I got back to my seat I noticed my lovely wife was sprawled across both seats fast asleep, snoring so loud it drowned out the annoying hum from the engines outside.
So I end up sitting on the armrest for the next four hours taking intermittent walks around the plane to relieve my sore butt cheeks and spreading the walks far enough apart that I don't arouse any suspicions from the cabin crew. Being strapped to a seat in my condition would have been a recipe for disaster. I'm sure I would have ended up speaking in tongues, although maybe a nice doctor on board could have sedated me.
On arrival at Vancouver my legs were tired, my butt cheeks were sore, I was sweaty, I was so tired I thought my body was going to start to shut down just to keep my little brain going.
And then my chipper wife wakes up fresh as a daisy and asks if we are there yet.
