The Last Leg is the Longest

I hope you like my alliterative axiom? I have now done four long flights. The first was OK, and I managed to doze for a couple of hours. I watched several movies, one of which was the latest Twilight episode (don't judge me!). I was disproportionately disconcerted by the fact that the 50-something man next to me also watched this. Surely he is the wrong demographic?! The second flight was Turbulence City. The third was utterly unmemorable, except that when I got off the plane, I couldn't find my boarding pass. I had to sit on the Bench of Shame while they took my passport and went off to get me a new boarding pass. Before they returned, I had found the original one myself, so then they had to cancel the replacement one and retrieve my passport.

The last flight was the worst. It always seems on the last leg of a trip that time slows to a crawl, but it was really noticeable on this 11-hour grueling test of endurance. A toddler sat behind me. She cried a fair bit, but not all the time - at other times she played, talked, ate and slept. However, no matter what the child was doing, the mother had her ceiling light on ALL the time. It was like trying to sleep outside under a blazing sun. No sleep for me.

The girl across the aisle from me had three seats to herself, so she promptly lay down and went to sleep (she LAY DOWN! I would have killed to lie down by this point). I could not decide if I hated her or the guy behind her more. He also had 3 seats, but stayed upright for the entire trip. The waste!

Also, it appeared I had been mistakenly seated in the middle of the Olympic Farting Team. Either that, or it was all the work of one very dedicated individual. Periodically, a breeze blew through the plane and I could briefly breathe until the dark miasma descended once more. For a while, I suspected the perp was the guy seated in front of me. However, there was another attack while he was up out of his seat. So unless he was a ventriloquist farter, or he'd detonated a slow-release bomb before he got up, he was in the clear. Unlike me. I arrived at Auckland broken in mind, body and nasal passages.

The flight landed 45 mins early and I breezed through customs to find the family waiting. Now back home, grimly wading through the 2820 photographs. I only hope I can find 10 good ones...