Best and Worst Flights – Part One
Short Travel Stories
Two specific flights stand out to me as the single best and single worst traveling experiences that I have ever had.
BEST FLIGHT:
I had planned an “LA-over” en route to Sydney from NYC and was excited to spend the night in the city I had called home for three previous years. I’d arranged lavish accommodations for the night with my dear friend Rocky and her roommate, Sabina. My intention was to have a blast, go out, and party just enough to calm my nerves for my fourteen-hour flight the next day—but to not get too crazy either.
My night ended up getting so crazy it was cray-cray! To go on about the events of that night in too much detail would be sidetracking from the main point of this story. But I will give you some snidbits of the events of that September eve:
We drank from the second I landed to the second I took off. We bounced from club to club all night, got high on marijuana and life. I rode on the back of the fastest motorcycle on the planet with no helmet and was clutching the ripped, ab-tastic stomach of one of the hottest guys I have ever laid eyes on (a blue-eyed, black-haired, Albanian, Jake Gyllenhaal-ian drink o’ water). And then I slept maybe two hours. FINALLY, I was rewarded with Sabina giving me a sleeping pill that would end up rocking my world.
With a name like Sabina, you can assume, only in LA, that the bitch was a model, Russian, and something fierce. Check all the above. Except that Sabina was from Kazakhstan, not Russia. Like Patsy Stone, I never once saw her eat a thing—at least nothing that didn’t end up in her nose or swallowed in one gulp. So I should have known better when she handed me what looked like could have been a Shetland pony’s tranquilizer for my extended flight.
I was sitting on her balcony, watching Sabina chain smoke her ultra-thin, ultra-long cigarettes whilst she pounded shot after shot of vodka in true Eastern-Bloc form.
“You go to Australia?” she asked in her thick accent. I nodded. She smirked a bit in a model-esque, cunty sorta way. “Tank Got for Wodka,” she answered as she tipped another one back.
That shot seemed to count a little more than the previous ones. I could tell by the way she smacked then licked her lips and quietly hummed to herself. Sabina suddenly sat up: Her thin, pale frame walked over to where her bathroom was and disappeared behind the door of the w.c. Not even a minute passed before she swung open the loo door and strutted toward me like a gazelle on the Serengeti. She held out her thin, boney hand and handed me the pill I spoke of before. I kindly refer to it as Sabina’s Former-Soviet-Hardcore sleeping pill. And here’s why:
Typically, I’m the type of person who can take a Benadryl and not have it do anything to me other than suppress allergies. Not even two “Bennie and the Jets,” as I call them, would wipe me out. So when Sabina handed me the sleeping pill and told me,
“Vill help joo sleep,” I thought nothing of popping that sucker in my mouth the second I got on board the plane. I don’t think I’d even buckled up before I made the decision that I was gonna sleep on that flight. So down the hatch, she went.
If you have never flown Qantas, you absolutely must! Their planes are fabooshk, and the service is impeccable. Well, maybe that’s because I had cute, gay, Aussie flight attendants who became extra-specially attentive when they found out I was flying there to MOVE to go to school and be with my Australian boyfriend! Either way, I ended up having four seats in a row to myself; therefore, I knew I was going to get sleep either way.
So I popped that Former-Soviet-Hardcore Sleeping Pill and began to enjoy my flight. I remember ordering steak and a glass or two of wine. I remember turning on the TV in front of me and starting a movie. I flirted briefly with the flight attendants on a bathroom break to take out my contacts. And then I blacked out.
The next thing I knew, I was fast asleep. At some point in my dreams, someone was shoving me, saying: “Wake up! Wake up!” in a funny accent. But I wasn’t dreaming. My eyes opened up, yet it took them a second or two to focus.
“Sir, sir!” One of the cute flighties said. “We’ve landed!”
I couldn’t process what he was saying. “What?” I uttered. My mouth was dry.
“Sir, we are here. We’ve landed.”
I patted my hand against the seat pocket to try to ferret out my glasses. I smiled at the flight attendant, and he proceeded to walk away. I found my glasses, slapped them on my face, and used my arms to hoist myself up.
And what I saw absolutely shocked me: No one was left on the plane! NO ONE WAS ON THE PLANE!
Yup! My cracked-out ass—strung out on Sabina’s crack-pill wonderfulness—slept through the entire flight, the landing, the deplaning, and everyone walking by! I probably slept at least eleven hours straight and thank God to this day I didn’t get deep vein thrombosis! Though I was embarrassed to be such a disheveled mess in front of the attendants, I look back on that flight as the single best flight I have ever taken! I was fed well, treated like a king, and slept like one too. It was so great that I literally had no jet lag at all. I even went to the beach within a few hours of landing that day because I felt so wonderful!
Best. Flight. Ever!!
to be continued…
NEXT: Best and Worst Flights – Part Two
more by KOELEN ANDREWS
