The only people responding appropriately to air travel are the crying children

The part of this trip we most feared, by far, was the overnight flight with Annalise. Annalise has flown, but only on direct flights during the day. These flights went well, but involved us playing a lot of defense, as her radius of impact gradually grew to include more and more of our seat neighbors until everyone was mercifully released.

Our itinerary for this trip would have no such mercy. We were to fly overnight from Raleigh to Reykjavik (6 hours), then an hour long connection requiring us to clear passport control, then to Oslo (2.5 hours). We’d spend the night in Oslo, then fly on to Trondheim the following day. And, wrangling all those bags! Whew!

At the airport, we were those people with the overloaded carts. We had four suitcases, a ski bag, a baby, a backpack to carry a baby, a backpack to be carried BY a baby, a backpack to carry all our carry-on stuff, and a backpack carrying a fold up car seat. If you’re counting backpacks and backs, you see the difficulty. This is a dramatically different model of travel from our “one carry-on only” model of pre-Annalise travel.

Nevertheless, we made it to the plane, had our dinner, watched some planes, changed Annalise into PJs, then began entertaining the gate, with Annalise running around in backpacks that were too big for her, into restricted areas, and yelling “I’m ready to get on the plane!”

Unlike Annalise, I hate flying. I hate being crowded, I hate hurry-up-and-wait, and I hate long, unexplained delays. And, of course, being 6’5″, I hate airplane seats. There’s not enough leg room, so my knees hurt. They’re not tall enough, so my head’s over the top of the headrest. And they’re not wide enough to allow for the twist-and-slouch maneuver that might let all that work. These three dimensions of not-enough make for an experience which is borderline hostile.

What I haven’t minded, despite this bah-humbug, is kids on a flight, if only because a crying child has always captured my internal monologue pretty accurately. Who could blame them? Of course, an ability to keep a positive attitude is admirable but if we all acted like crying kids on planes, I think some things would change for the better.

So, you can imagine my overall pessimism going into this trip. While the seat would actually fit her, it would be taking off an hour after her bedtime, there would be waiting, there would be lots and lots of unfamiliar things to distract from sleeping, and most difficult, there would be listening to directions.

I’ll spare you the suspense: Annalise was awesome and rolled with it all. She was happy to eat garbage meals in the airport. She was willing to use the plane bathroom despite the scary loud flush. She didn’t melt down on the plane as loud food service went on and on and on until her bedtime was four hours past. Unlike me, she didn’t (as far as I know) try to mentally give the people behind us an embolism when they wouldn’t stop loudly talking after food service finally ended.

In the end, we all got a couple hours of sleep (substantially less than Annalise’s usual 12). I’m left to ask Icelandair, is it really necessary to serve a 3-course dinner at 11:30 at night?

We landed in Reykjavik, a groggy Annalise was happy to ride through passport control contained in her backpack, and we made our next flight no problem. They served a great breakfast that gave Annalise the opportunity to cover herself in Nutella, and then we stared blearily at Happy Feet until we landed in Oslo.

Oslo was, finally and understandably, Annalise’s limit. She lost it in the lobby, took a nap, then was generally ornery until she went to bed at 7:30 in a hotel room. Allison and I fell asleep at about 8:30, with porters scheduled to help us carry our bags back to the airport for the final leg at 8:30 the following morning. We would have time for a large, leisurely breakfast at the hotel (Norwegian hotels have great breakfasts), before getting to the airport in plenty of time.

Naturally, instead, Allison was the first to awake at 8:28 am, two minutes before the porters arrived. The morning was a chaotic panic of heaving things in bags while entertaining a confused but good-natured toddler in a falsely calm voice.

A session on the airport playground, one more uneventful flight (a different baby cried the whole way and his twin barfed on the landing, encapsulating my feelings about the whole experience), and an introduction to weird Norwegian websites necessary for the hotel to ship me the toiletries I inevitably left behind in our stampede to the airport, and we were whole in Trondheim. The jet lag is significant.

Good job Annalise!