Home » Cats, Photos, Traveling

“Just don’t have kids.”

26 January 2008 3 Comments

cats at airportYesterday was a long one. First thing in the morning, there’s nothing I like to do more than wrestle two cats to the ground and shove pills down their throats. Adam tried to help by suggesting that we “hide” the pills in tuna. I was tired enough that I didn’t think this one through at all and figured it was worth a shot. Oh, they enjoyed the tuna…but were careful to make sure the hot pink pill never touched their lips voluntarily. I may or may not have held this against him for at least an hour. Until common sense returned.

With the cats packed and our luggage stowed in the car, we set off to LAX a half hour later than I had hoped. Somehow the fact that it was Friday (which means that everyone and their mother is on the freeway) had also escaped our brains as well. Brilliant.

Didn’t matter - we got there in plenty of time and by then the kitties had started to doze a little…though they would continue to fight the sleepies until we landed. Much to my surprise, everyone was absolutely 100% kind and considerate about the fact that we were trucking through the airport with nearly forty pounds of feline.

At the security check, Adam was in charge of pulling laptops out while I readied Louie for him to carry through the metal detector. Yes, you have to pull them out so the carriers can go through. Not a big deal - they were both slow to react and not really fazed by the activity…and they each had harnesses/leashes on, just in case. Tucker came next, was noticeably unimpressed, but again - his ninja-like tendencies were curbed by the drugs.

cats under seatsOnce we got through, it was smooth sailing until boarding. I’d hoped that since we were window/middle, we board early to get the cats settled. No go. So instead we had to wait until Group 4 was called, trudge down the aisle trying not to smack someone in the head with our bags and pounce on the poor soul in 19D who couldn’t have anticipated that four living things would end up beside him.

Luckily, another seat in an empty row a little further back came available. Relief all around in row 19.

The rest of the flight was pretty uneventful. Nanny Diaries, some music, a little reading and plenty of hot tea. Adam and I had agreed ahead of time that we would wait for everyone to get off the plane first, then we’d get out. adam and rachel on planeBeing that person holding up the line sucks, even when it’s just difficulty getting a duffle bag out of the overhead bin. We didn’t know how hard it would be to get everything organized, and weren’t willing to risk a trampling by angry travellers.

When the coast was clear, we started to pull our bags down and I carefully worked on getting the boys out from under the seats (as you may have noticed, they were turned on their sides to fit). Out comes one of the flight attendants, bundled up in winter wear and looking impatient.

Flight Attendant (FA): Oh. You’re still here. <insert pursed lips and narrow eyes>
Me: Yep - just wanted to let everyone go ahead of us - getting all our stuff together.
FA: Uh-huh.

This is where we continued packign and tried to ignore her impatient staring.

FA: *snort*…all I can say is, Just don’t have kids - because you’d NEVER get out of here.

This is where I made a mental note that this blog post was going to be a long one.

FA: Oh God. Um…you’re probably trying to have kids, huh? Now that I say that…right?

This is where I started racking my brain for ideas on how the next words that came out her mouth COULD BE ANY MORE AWKWARD AND BEAUTIFULLY INAPPROPRIATE.

I love it. The look on her face when she realized what she’d said was priceless. On more sleep, I might have messed with her head a bit, but instead I assured her we weren’t offended, all was fine and to have a great night.

Lucky for me, we still have two more trips like this to go. Let’s hope they all go this well.

3 Comments »

  • david said:

    Who brings cats on a trip?

  • Rachel (author) said:

    I don’t know - who does bring cats on a trip? Since our adventure involves an international move, I’d say 5 hours on a plane with them beats four days in a car…no?

  • Mahala said:

    Ooooo.. that flight attendant was suffering from a serious case of “foot in mouth” disease.

Leave your response!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.