Some things you only need to learn once. And a caveat. If even the mention of throwing up makes you head to the toilet –skip reading this.
Any plane that holds less than 130 people is small by my standards. A plane that holds four is one I avoid.
My husband recently fulfilled his life’s dream and purchased just such a plane. He loves it. I do not. But I do love him, and so once in a while he lures me into the plane — especially when commercial flights are overbooked. After all, what could go wrong on a three hour flight across the desert? On a hot August afternoon? With something called thermals that bounce the plane up/down, forwards/backwards and side/side – at the same time.
I am prepared. My husband has purchased a stock of sick sacks. These sacks are smaller than a lunch sack. Herein, is the first problem. If you have just eaten a meal that would reasonably fit in a lunch sack, it would stand to reason that if you have to get rid of that lunch quickly, you need a sick sack at LEAST as big as a lunch sack.
There I was, in a back seat of a small plane bouncing around when I realized my recent lunch would not be with me much longer. I grabbed a sick sack, placed it over my mouth and sealed it as best I could. Instinctual but incorrect. Because contents exit the stomach with much more force than they enter, any air trapped in the bag is the first thing to be released–thus breaking the seal and allowing incoming contents to follow the escape path in a artistic swoop hanging gracefully in the air before splattering downward.
My teenage daughter, sleeping next to me, awoke just in time to witness the swoop and splatter. She looked at me as if I had just swallowed a cockroach. But even that look paled in comparison when I said to her, “give me your sock.”
“My what?!”
Your sock! Give Me Your SOCK!”
It was the closest thing to a napkin, paper towel or tissue in the entire plane. She peeled off her sock and dropped it in my lap with the words “Don’t bother giving it back.”
Upon exiting the plane I announced to my husband, “I’m going home commercially.” He actually looked relieved.
It was a while before I flew again, but just as a mother forgets the pain of childbirth and ends up pregnant once more, I found myself in the same plane, on a similar hot August afternoon going over the same desert. With the same effect.
Apparently, I was not the only one to learn something from the first experience. My husband handed me a new sick sack – a kitchen garbage bag inside a second kitchen garbage bag that I could practically crawl into and out of which nothing could emerge.
Now, if we could only get the airlines to learn the same lesson.
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