By TMoM Team Member Allison Tobey

On average, two million people fly per day, so I am sure every one of these two million passengers has their own story to tell. I want to share one of my flying experiences, because at the very moment it was happening, I felt l was the only person having a rough day.

After spending a long weekend in Nashville with our friends, we were packing up to head home. My daughter comes in our room with the look of sickness on her face…droopy eyes, pale but flushed. She has a fever of 102 and says her stomach hurts. Fantastic! I’ve traveled with sick kids before and it might be the worst punishment for a parent. After checking in for our flight, we notice we are in row 32. Row 32 on this plane is the last row, beside the engines, with no windows … claustrophobia!

We get settled in our seats and moments later my daughter started getting sick. I can’t even describe how horrible this is for everyone on this plane. Well, it gets worse. We sit and sit and sit and sit for at least 35 to 40 minutes. Now we are stressed that we are going to miss our connecting flight. The flight finally takes off and it is so choppy that I am certain my daughter will be sick (again) as well as others on our flight. Keep in mind, we have no windows which help with orientation, so it’s a horrible feeling of not being able to look outside.

We finally land and rush off the plane to our next gate hoping we haven’t missed our second flight. Guess what? Our connecting flight is the same plane we just got off of.Don’t the flight attendants usually announce that kind of stuff before letting us depart?They did! We didn’t hear it because we were sitting beside the mega-loud engines.

Here we go, back on the same plane to the same horrible seats in row 32.  And … here we go again. We wait and wait and wait for 1 hour and 20 minutes this time because of “mechanical” problems. Sweet, wasn’t this the plane we were just on for 1.5 hours? Super pumped we flew on a plane that now has “mechanical” issues.As we sit and wait, my son leans over and tells us his stomach hurts but not the throw up kind. By the way, my daughter hasn’t thrown up anymore, but does have a raging fever. About 3 or 4 minutes later I smell the most horrendous human gas, and then hear my son giggling.   We now have every passenger sitting near us squirming in their seats because of the vicious odors coming out of my 12 year old son. That goes on for about 15 minutes.

We finally take off and the man diagonally in front of me proceeds to pick his nose for 35 straight minutes.  As gross as it was, I couldn’t stop staring at him.  So we’ve combined vomit, vile gas, boogers, claustrophobia, layovers, and mechanical problems into roughly a 4 hour trip. Doesn’t that sound like a great time to be had?

As we land, I breathe a sigh of relief that we are almost home.  In the grand scheme of rough days, this is nothing, I realize that. But, for the fun it out, I thought I would share my flying experience with you. Now, I would love to hear about your most horrific traveling experience. Misery loves company!  🙂