SYD-LAX, The Flight!
Remember that advice I gave you at the beginning of my last post? The piece about taking infants with you to skip all of the queues. I’m not so sure that queue jumping makes up for the re-percussions of international travel with an energetic almost 3 year old being confined to a half square metre chair and a sick 9 month old that can’t stop coughing, spluttering and crying through what must be making him feel absolutely awful.
We were seated in a bulkhead which was wonderful and we had a basinet for Luc which made things a whole lot easier.....when he was happy to sleep that was. To start with we had an entire row to ourselves which was fantastic. Then this poor, defenceless, single, 20 something guy sat down in the vacant seat we had desperately hoped was going to remain empty. Lucky for all of us, but mostly him, the great attendants saw what may have been on the cards long before we did and moved him to another seat well away from us, the kids and the pending mess.
The flight was refreshing, relaxing and surprisingly worry free. For anyone not sitting within ears distance of us that was.
To be fair, the frustration was thanks to Ben not having anywhere to lie down as the arms of our seats didn’t fold up. Why i dont know? Every other arm rest in every other plane we’ve flown on for the last 10 years has, but as Murphy would have it, when we needed them gone the most, there they were like big, stupid pieces of super-glued plastic laughing at us in jest. We put him on the floor in the end so he could at least lie down straight. At first the attendants were none to happy with this and asked that we put him back in his seat. We did this and he was miserable for the next hour non-stop. To combat the problem we put him back on the floor, covered him in a black blanket and placed our legs in positions so precaurious, he was able to sleep undetected for the best part of 3 hours.
Luc unfortunately wasn’t much happier. Once we got him to sleep he was OK. Outside of that it was up to Kelly and I to take turns in holding him whilst trying to get a little shut-eye ourselves......By touchdown we had held him for some 600 minutes of an 840 minute flight.
I am happy to report, after many arguments, cold hard stares and alot of huffing and puffing we made it to LA in one, broken but very quickly made-up piece.
