Fly the Friendly Skies

I thought I'd share a few stories culled from the vast trove (which means the few I can remember) of my husband’s extensive airline travels.

Do you prefer the porn star or the threesome?

I should mention that DH frequently travels in first class due to upgrades, etc. So that’s where he sat across the aisle from an engaged couple discussing one of their wedding gifts. Hubby said the woman was a knockout blonde. Turns out she was an identical twin and the wedding gift to her fiancée was, you guessed it, a threesome with her generous sis. Yes, I do think the rich are different.

He knows people wherever he goes. But I was surprised when we flew home from London last month and he was chatting with one of the flight attendants. I asked how he knew her and he said for some reason she’s always on the flight when he travels to London. I knew he was acquainted with plenty of attendants on his regular routes in the US, but international flights as well? Good thing I trust him.

We certainly do not buy first class tickets when traveling personally. So dh was all excited a couple years ago when he went to a business dinner and won the door prize – two first class tickets on Virgin Atlantic to London. Nice prize, huh? He actually called me from the dinner to tell me about it.

The euphoria lasted until they handed him the fine print on the way out the door. We’d have to pay income taxes, both state and federal, on the prize, and Virgin Atlantic had valued the tickets at $16,000! So our “free” tickets would cost us at least $6,000 in taxes. Some deal. We never redeemed them, and I couldn’t help wondering how much free advertising Virgin Atlantic got by “donating” those tickets again and again. The only people who could use them would be people who wouldn’t owe income taxes, and how likely were they to be at a business dinner?

All three of the pictures on this blog are from the same airport. Can anyone identify it? (This photo is the airport after a blizzard.) We landed here once in a terrible blizzard. After circling forever, the plane finally hit the runway, skidded, and traveled for a looooooong time. I remember wishing it would just hit a snowbank and stop. Dumb. Luckily for me, at least I didn’t know we were traveling sideways. I saw the runway lights, but as my husband pointed out, we weren’t supposed to be facing them. A large football player with a Super Bowl ring was sitting with us and my husband said he thought the guy was going to crush the arm rest. Yeah, you could have heard a pin drop in the cabin when that plane was landing. Then a big cheer when we finally stopped. Then the pilot came on and said, “Well, after that interesting landing, they've closed this airport. So if this wasn’t your final destination, it is now.”

I did find a romance hero on an airplane flight. For some reason, the copilot was standing at the front of the cabin. He looked like Christopher Reeve back when he was Superman. Except better. So my dd, who was about 14, said to the flight attendant, "That pilot is SO hot!" The attendant walked right up to the pilot and told him. The cute part was, he turned bright red. I couldn’t believe it. He had to have women swarming him wherever he went. But it didn’t seem to have inflated his ego. Definitely romance material. And, free tip, my kids ended up with some goodies from the airline.

Writing this blog is bringing many more odd stories to mind. But let me end with this one. DH was in a very crowded airport in Florida. He said there was a porn star swanning around, with men gawking at her, asking for her autograph (huh?) and basically following her wherever she went. I wondered how he knew her “profession”. He described her (in great detail) and said it was more than obvious.

So it was lunchtime and DH sat down with a man he didn’t know at a table in a crowded restaurant and they started talking. In walks the porn star. The other man stands up and announces he’s going to invite her to lunch. He marches over to her, says a few words, and the next thing hubby knows, they are all eating lunch together. At the end of which, my husband knew her life story (or at least that’s his story and he is sticking with it).

So my first thought, of course, was how to spin a tale and here’s what I started with: While Carly Carson was driving their three kids through a raging blizzard in the mountains of Vermont, her loving husband was dining with a porn star in Orlando.

What do you think? Catchy opener? (It happens to be true.)