We love to travel and on our first trip with our son we made sure to do everything that we could to not make the six hour flight miserable for everyone else on board.
As usual, I talked to our pediatrician making sure that it would be ok to give Benadryl to my son so that he would sleep, if not the entire flight, most of it. Then I also made sure to do everything I could to try to keep him entertained. I guess not everyone thinks about those on the flight with them.
On a four hour flight from Salt Lake City to Orlando, Florida we knew what to expect with our own child, but weren’t thinking about if there were going to be other children with us on board. I should have guessed that the flight would be full of little kids, being that we are going to one of the happiest places on earth.
Sometimes when traveling I need to be sure that maybe my kid isn’t going to be a problem, if I have anything to do with it, but others definitely might be the problem. For example this infant screamed the entire flight. Not only that, but the mother apparently had been through surgery recently making it so that she wasn’t able to walk around calming the baby. Needless to say, the both spent the entire flight sobbing, the mother almost worse than the baby. I feel like the first hour is free, you can expect a baby to cry for a little bit but after 3.5 hours something needs to happen.
Fortunately, the sweetest grandma (who couldn’t walk well herself), took the screamer and walked up and down the aisles rocking the child and doing everything in her power to keep him calm and happy. He was until she handed him back to his mother. Poor everyone on board. I get it! You get stressed out, you know that everyone is looking at you and your screaming child and there is nothing you can do. Well, we would rather you try to do anything instead of passing the child on to everyone else on the plane. Maybe next time I will bring extra Benedryll for the other children, or even break off a piece of my Ambien for the passengers on the flight.
As the plane was taxing to take off the rather large woman in front of me, who smells of cat pee, starts to have a coughing attack and barely makes it into a barf bag, which never really hides the smell.
Now, for the next four hours, we not only have the screaming baby with a hysterical mother, but the smell of cat pee and vomit encompassing the entire front of the plane. And just when you think the smell has gone away, she moves and the smell quickly returns; slapping me directly in the face with its nose piercing aroma.
The woman next to me went to the restroom and on her return I felt like I had walked into a spa. She had put on some kind of aromatherapy lotion making the area feel like it was back to normal. Had I died and gone to heaven? Suddenly my nose wasn’t burning and I could breath again.
I never talk to the people I sit by if I don’t know them and I made sure to ask her if she had put on some kind of lotion or something that brought life to the plane again. She too had noticed the smell and wasn’t sure where it was coming from either. We all had agreed that the smell was coming from the puker. What could we do to mask the smell?
How grateful I am for the amazing flight attendant doing everything in her power to get rid of the smell for us to make our flight a little more bearable. This flight attendant, I’ll call her Angel because she was sent from heaven to work this flight, was told about the vomit incident and quickly came and discreetly asked if they had any garbage. They were handing everything, but the bag would not move.
Again she asked, “Are you sure that’s everything?” Why they wanted to save the bag, I don’t know. Some people are into that. I’ve watched my strange addiction and they definitely seemed like they could be from that.
Angel finally asked for the bag of vomit and they referred to it as just spit. Ummm I have been in a dental office and know the difference between the smell of spit and vomit.
She then noticed the smell herself and brought a bottle of “anti-bacterial” spray which they use for the bathrooms for any kind of incident that the smell becomes too much to handle.
You would have thought there was a dead body with how much we were spraying that stuff: on the floors, the seats in front of us (obviously), and even in the air. This masked the smell for a bit, but not for long. Angel then had another brilliant idea and brought us a bag of coffee grounds.
We put the bag in the seat pocket in front of us, making the air smell of coffee instead of cat pee, but then whenever the puker moved we could pull out the bag, shake it a bit and the coffee smell would intensify.
The puker decided that it was time to get some shut eye and stuffed their pillow pet between their seat and the window. The scent of urine burned our eyes and my wife quickly grabbed the bag and started shaking it.
Coffee grinds started flying all over their pillow pet, but covered the stench immensely. We knew that we had finally fixed the problem, until….they woke up and moved their pillow.
“Why are there coffee grounds all over my pillow?” the puker said. “That is so weird, I don’t know how that could have happened, but it sure does smell good.” NO crap! pun completely intended.
To end it all, we got yelled at by the puker because we had turned on our light and she was trying to get some sleep and the screaming baby wasn’t helping. Lady, it’s not our baby and you need deodorant. The hysterically crying mother must have locked herself in the bathroom or something because the baby finally calmed down and stopped crying. Every passenger on that flight was grateful for their ear plugs and everyone who didn’t have them broke the alcohol sales record for a domestic flight.
This flight will never be forgotten by every single passenger and crew member aboard that plane.
