100 Countries

Not long after the three of us strangers (a man to the far right, a lady in the middle and me to the right) took our seats in the middle row for the 5 hour flight to Hawaii, we knew it was going to be one of those flights. So did everyone else in the general area of the plane. All eyes were on us and you could see the sympathy underneath the clear relief that it wasn’t them that had ended up where we were.

The individual that made it clear that this flight was going to feel much, much longer was Thomas, a 2 year old in the center seat behind us. He started off by merely screaming at the top of his lungs when the plane wasn’t moving and progressed to kicking all the seats in front of him as hard as he could when he realized that his parents weren’t going to let him out of his child’s seat when he demanded.

As soon as the doors closed, the man in the far left seat basically clotheslined the first stewardess that walked by to ask if there were any free seats in the plane where he could move. The lady in the center seat was only a couple of minutes behind. That left me, alone in front of Thomas, taking the cries for a bottle and his kicking feet full force. It wasn’t long before the stewardess approached me and asked if I would like to also change seats. You could see the shock on her face when I said all would be fine.

Basically I knew that the screams that Thomas was emitting were loud enough that it really didn’t matter where in the plane I was seated. I could plainly see they were going to bother everyone in the general vicinity from the looks of the faces of the other passengers around me. And if the screaming was going to be the same, I saw the opportunity that Thomas had provided.

While the rest of the plane was full, I now had two free seats next to me. The looks of sympathy soon turned to jealousy when the fasten seat belt turned off and I immediately lifted the arm rests, stretched out my legs, made myself a three seat bed and relaxed in the comfort of having space in a crammed plane.

Thomas certainly wasn’t an angel the entire way, but his parents did let him up to run around when the seat belt signs went off. And even when he cried and complained, it was a lot more bearable in a comfortable lying position than all those around me that had to listen to the same screams while sitting up. Sometimes it really is possible to make lemonade when the day is giving you lemons…