Tag Archives: travel

Seven tips for improving your next flight

Flying metal tube of doom!

An uncounted number of stand-up comedians, both the successful and the ones who continue to toil away on the circuit to scattershot laughs, have worked the quirks and foibles of air travel into their routine at least once in their career, for the simple reason that it’s a universal experience that no one has less than a strong opinion about.  The old saying about how God would have given men wings if he had been meant to fly encapsulates the concept that the sky will never be our natural home – why else would we have to design and build these garish winged steel cylinders to get us above the clouds?  It seems too, of late, that fiscal austerity has conspired to make the experience as miserable as possible for the vast majority of passengers.  Even those of us who are just old enough to remember getting a full meal with actual metal cutlery on Wardair can cringe at stories about airlines reducing leg room yet again to cram in three more rows of chairs.  Airline advertising to the contrary, getting there isn’t half the fun, it’s just something you have to endure.  But as passengers, we make it worse for ourselves.  Expecting that the trend is not likely to change on the airline’s side in the near future, there are still a few things that could be adjusted to make the trip moderately more enjoyable, and none of them require the airline doing a blessed thing.  It’s just a question of some additional personal responsibility:

  1. Pre-boarding.  When the gate attendant advises that passengers with small children or those requiring special assistance in getting onboard the aircraft can come up first, why does it seem like everyone else in the damn departure lounge assumes they can as well?  Unless you are carrying three screaming terrors or are so elderly you can barely stand, wait for your turn.  What perplexes me most is that there’s no prize for getting on first – you don’t get to leave earlier and you certainly don’t get a lapdance from the stewardess or even an extra bag of peanuts.  You are trading in a precious few more minutes in the wide open lounge with its ready access to expansive, clean washrooms for the claustrophobia of the passenger cabin and the smelly steamer-trunk sized toilet.  Just chill and stand up when they call you.
  2. The “fresh air vents” above the seats.  I have opened these exactly twice during my history of air travel.  Both times I have come down with horrendous, hacking coughs and colds.  The problem is that when the outside temperature up above the clouds is about -40, real “fresh air” would freeze the plane.  So the dirty secret – pun intended – is that this so-called fresh air is just recycled cabin air, which means you’re inhaling every filthy little germ that has had the temerity to sneak through security to make the journey with you.  You are basically asking to get sick by opening these things.  If you don’t know the person you’re sitting next to, do them a solid and keep your vent closed, no matter how much you want to feel any semblance of breeze on your face.  Their lungs will thank you, and so will yours.
  3. On the subject of germs, personal hygiene.  I don’t care if you think you’re one of those people who can get away with bathing every other day.  You’re about to inflict your natural odor on dozens of strangers who, stunningly enough, won’t find it as sexy as you think your partner does.  When you know you’re going to be flying within the next six hours, please, shower, slap on that Speed Stick and keep your arms at your sides at all times.
  4. Reclining seats.  I have noted above the progressive decrease in the amount of leg room available on each flight, and while you at five-foot-two may see nothing wrong with kicking back after the seatbelt sign has been turned off, the gentleman behind you who exceeds six feet (eg. me) doesn’t relish feeling like the proverbial sardine for the next three and a half hours.  The very least you can do is ask.  I might be in a good mood and have absolutely no problem with it.  But if you just arbitrarily decide to force your seat back into my face without asking, I reserve the right to shove it back upright with equal discourtesy, and you shouldn’t act shocked.  And let’s be honest, these aren’t exactly La-Z-Boys – the amount of extra comfort you’ll achieve by reclining those three entire inches is infinitesimal at best, particularly when it compares to my level of frustration at having your seat back under my nose for the whole flight.  Stay vertical and keep the peace.
  5. Freaking out audibly at every little bump.  I get that it can be a little unnerving, but let’s just try to accept that air is mobile and constantly changing and the same forces that give us the rain we need to grow things for us to eat and keep our lawns green are what cause our planes to rattle around sometimes.  There are thousands of flights all over the world every single day and the media’s propensity to hype the hell out of the odd one that goes wrong has led average people to believe that they have something like a one in three chance of actually surviving a flight through rough weather.  The airline has nothing to gain by killing two hundred of its customers, so they don’t fly through this stuff if they don’t think they can make it.  Just pretend you’re on a roller coaster.
  6. Clapping when the flight lands.  This has made me roll my eyes since my very first flight.  I get that it’s ostensibly a way to thank the pilots, but the clapping always sounds like it’s less out of gratitude and more out of white-knuckled relief – like it’s somehow a God-ordained miracle that the plane arrived safely, and the same thing didn’t actually happen twelve hundred more times across the world that very same day.  I know this isn’t likely to change, but while we’re on the subject of the end of the flight, can we perhaps not all jump up at once the instant the seatbelt sign is off and perhaps just file out in a little more orderly fashion – again, recognizing that between Customs and the wait for your bags you still won’t get out of the airport any faster?
  7. Complaining and acting as though the airline has engaged in a massive conspiracy specifically to screw you.  We are all in the same damn flying metal tube of doom, brah, and what’s happening to you is happening to all of us.  None of us are getting where we want to go any faster or any more comfortably.  I was flying home from Calgary once and what was meant to be a short stop in Edmonton turned into a two-hour stay on the tarmac while a thunderstorm moved overhead (ground crews aren’t allowed out if there’s risk of lightning).  While we sat there, hot, frustrated and increasingly impatient, the drunken douchebag next to me felt it necessary, every five minutes or so, to exclaim with great erudition and wit, “Get this f—in’ thing in the air!”  Hearing this, the pilots sprang to action and revved up the engine and… well, no, they didn’t do anything other than continue to wait for safety clearance, as they would have had this assbutt remained silent – the only difference would have been a much calmer, more congenial atmosphere in the cabin – manna for some very tired and upset passengers.  You’re not being funny, or any kind of hero by expressing what we might be thinking.  You’re just being a dick, and as I think the Emperor Constantine once observed, no one likes flying with a dick that isn’t theirs.

So there you have it – seven easy tips that will cost you absolutely nothing, require the airline crew to expend zero effort, and may result in a much more pleasant trip for all involved.  What the airlines themselves can do to ameliorate the trip is a much longer list, and is more of a pipe dream in terms of it possibly happening in my lifetime.  But there is one thing – during the safety presentation, I think we can agree that at this point we all basically understand the general principles of how to operate a seatbelt, right?

We can’t stop here, this is bat country

Las Vegas - little fear, some loathing.

I’ll admit I’ve wanted to use that line for the title of a post for a long time.  Then it occurred to me that it might be best applied to a review of the locale it is describing, and thus a new category is born.  The reality of life and limited vacation days mean that my better half and I don’t get to see as much of the world as we’d like, so we treasure our infrequent voyages abroad and try to pack as much sightseeing into them as we can while setting aside sufficient downtime – no point coming back from holiday feeling more tired than when you left.  Las Vegas, which we visited four years ago, is obviously not a place to lounge around (unless it’s a specific type of “lounge” we’re referring to).  If New York is the city that never sleeps, Vegas is the city that can’t sleep because it’s on a perpetual crack high.  In Hannibal, Agent Starling comments about a letter from Dr. Lecter postmarked Las Vegas that it must be from a remailing service, as Vegas is the last place the cultured killer would ever be.  There is however a culture here; it’s the culture of affluenza in the backyard of the one percent, oozing wealth and fortune and gobs of excess at every turn.

The Strip at night.

Monty Python has a bit where Michael Palin, playing a priest, goes on at length about how “incredibly huge” God is.  Your first sight of Sin City from the runway at McCarran International Airport is misleading – you can see the hotels in the distance, but your mind, accustomed to the size of hotels from your hometown, can’t comprehend the sheer scale.  You think, “oh, well it won’t take that long to walk up and down the Strip.”  That is, until the steroid-enhanced architecture of buildings like the MGM Grand, the Luxor, Caesar’s, the Bellagio and so on along Las Vegas Boulevard puts you in your place.  This is the pinnacle of capitalist triumph, built on inconceivable mountains of debt, what the Egyptian pharaohs might have crafted with their armies of slave labor had they been fond of slot machines, gin and neon.  By any measure of sustainable or even logical urban planning, Las Vegas should not exist – it makes no sense to drop a metropolis in the middle of the desert.  But once it’s there, why not go full tilt – let’s have trucks spew diesel fumes up and down the Strip for twenty-four hours straight carrying ads for gentleman’s clubs, let’s install ubiquitous misters to spray what’s left of the Colorado River on sunburned heads, and let’s run enough air conditioning to sear the ozone layer to a crisp.  Of course, that’s part and parcel of the Vegas allure – that with a few lucky hands at the blackjack table you too can afford your own $500-a-round golf course (or, at the least, not blink at the idea of a $6.50 glass of orange juice).

Taxes and gratuity not included.

There is plenty to loathe about the idea of Las Vegas; the excess, the waste, the glorification of wealth as mankind’s most noble ambition, the destitution of the ones who have bet the house and lost.  However, something about it tempts you to say “the heck with it,” set the moral issues aside and plunge yourself headfirst into the Vegas experience.  You can spend a week there, never set foot near a gaming table and still see something different in every passing minute.  Each hotel has its own custom Cirque de Soleil (or Cirque de Soleil-knockoff) show, and any Beatles fan wandering through won’t want to miss the Mirage’s presentation of LOVE, a collaboration setting the spectacle of Cirque to the timeless music of the Fab Four, which will never sound better than it does blasting remastered from a hundred speakers inside the theatre.  If you want kitsch, the cheesiness of “classic Vegas,” well, there is still the topless girlie show at the Tropicana, the men of ”Thunder from Down Under” at Excalibur, and “Sirens of T.I.” at Treasure Island, where the spectacle of a pirate ship sinking before your eyes every half hour has been enhanced with a lot of busty, scantily-dressed women.  If you want something you can safely show the kids, take them to the M&M’s exhibit to say hello to a lifesize Red and Peanut, then wander across Las Vegas Boulevard to watch the dancing fountains at the Bellagio and re-enact the final scene of Ocean’s Eleven.  And speaking of fountains, only in Las Vegas will you turn a corner in a casino and stumble across something like this:

A living statue at the Venetian. See the water pouring out of her fingertips?

Would I go back?  It shames me to admit, in a heartbeat.  Mainly because I feel like I still need to figure Las Vegas out.  I can sneer at its over-the-top opulence in one breath and revel in its eternal party atmosphere in the next, and for me that contradiction is endlessly fascinating.  There is art and joy to be found beneath the layers of gouda and heartbreak; sensory experiences to be relished, regal comforts to be absorbed.  Perhaps the karmic way to do Vegas is to pledge an equivalent amount of reading Shakespeare and doing charity work for every day you decide to spend under the Nevada neon.  Or, at the very least, tell yourself that the allure and seduction of Lady Vegas will not change you nor what you hold dear.  For bat country may be a nice place to visit, but you probably don’t want to leave your soul there.