Travel Gripes

So typical of me not to write for over a week because I'm in an amazing part of the country with dodgey internet reception , and instead of writing about THAT, I instead choose to have a whinge.

But it's my blog and I need to get it out.  And then I'll do the nice stuff because it really, honestly, truly was an amazing experience....

You know how when you're travelling, you're away from your normality and there are just some things that make you really cranky and make you all huffy and sigh'y and give people the evil eye?  Please all agree... well for me it's.....

..cabin luggage.  And not mine because I conscientiously do a head count that we all have our entitled 1 piece of cabin luggage per person allowance (and that a handbag and camera bag, and piece of rolled up art don't count).  We don't cross the line, we follow the rules.

So how is it that some people don't and that they never get busted for it?

We're flying back from Uluru a few days ago, and it was a 'mare of a checkin, think long queues, people pushing in (husband may have made a small scene with the pusher-in'ers - I'm not the only Scene Creator in my family), and of course, the luggage belt broken down.  We were at the end of a week long road trip, our bags were many, including two boxes of left over conference materials (we'd tagged our roadie onto a work conference thingee) that I had sellotaped together (not masking tape, but thin white sellotape from the hotel porters desk), and an akubra hat that hung down my neck threatening to choke me each time I hoisted up my assorted of shoulder bags/camera bags/snack bags/rolled art/ the bag with the leftover breakfast stuff - have any of you ever travelled with a 1/3 box of weetbixs?  I wasn't sure why I was either.

But somehow amongst the heat and the chaos and the flies, we manage to condense all our  bags into the "legal" amount of cabin luggage we were allowed to take on.

So you can imagine my dark thoughts when I saw a tourist getting on with a roll-on bag with another bag attached to it, and a hefty backpack on his back, the rest of his family had the same.  "They've got about 15 pieces between them", I stage whisper to the husband.  We both tut-tut and glare at them.  Like as in the death stare.  There is also lots of deep sighing from our seats as well.

This is a shared passion.  Travelling through the States we could never understand the rush to get on flights until that time we eventually got on with nowhere to put our bags as every inch of overhead locker space was jammed with black hard cabin bags from those that had pushed ahead of us.  And as soon as the overhead locker hoggers had their bags safely claiming that space, they always needed something out of it.  Always.  We'd just sit and glare at them "Get your pens/books/whatever's out before you put them up like we do!"  Simple?

We were flying home from India, we had that jaded been on a zillion flights, seen sights we'd never forget, had cow hair and poo wrapped around the wheels of our suitcase kind of travel fatigue.  It was a late night flight.  We got on, shoved our bags up, including a much loved expensive piece of rolled up art , put our eye masks on the top of our heads for easy access and settled down.
And then they arrived.  It looked like a school trip of very excited teenage Indian boys.  I'm guessing for some of them it was their first flight.  And those who had packed their cabin luggage for them hadn't flown before either.  There was mountains of it.  "This is going to get interesting", we thought.  And they proceeded to cram and jam, and push and shove until they got their monstrous amount of cabin luggage in the lockers.  Until the last boy approached our seats..  We'd watched him.  He'd spent way too much time chatting while the others were pushing and squashing.  There was nowhere left.  So he left his bag in the aisle.  See, we knew it was their first flight.  The air steward came along, wagged her finger at him and told him it couldn't stay there.

So he opened our full locker and thought "I'll give it a red hot go".

He started to push and shove and squash and squeeze his large solid bags into our almost full space.  "Hey mate, you can't, it's full, we have a piece of art up there, go find somewhere else", we both told him.  He wandered off down the plane, and then back to us.  And gave it another go.  My husband may or may not have raised his voice at the poor kid at that stage.

I didn't blame him, I blamed his parents.  Still I've been known to wear jeans over shorts and running shoes instead of sandals in sub tropical heat to bring the weight on my cabin luggage down like I did here...

Whats your pet travel gripe?  You can share mine if you like!