Airplane Seats

Okay, no one I know truly enjoys plane travel.  That said, traveling on an airplane is a new level of hell for the tall and for the overweight.

If you happen to be both it means so many years off purgatory, you might well get simply assumed into Heaven, like Elijah or the Blessed Virgin.

There was a time, ahem, when the amount of extra weight I carried around meant that I (yes, I can admit this) needed an extender in order to get the belt buckled on an airplane seat.  (omygoshicantbelieveiactuallywrotethatoutloud!) A friend gave me one so I could at least be spared the humiliation of asking for one... But you know, in the interests of honesty, there it is.  I still remember with perfect clarity the first time I had to ask for one.  A part of me felt like simply getting off the plane and quitting my high travel job and taking a job that involved never interacting with people or being seen by anyone, ever.  I found no job postings for trolls-under-the-bridge, though.  Guess you gotta have connections.

There are some airlines that make you buy two seats at some point.  Thankfully, due ONLY to the way my weight was carried, I never had to do that.  But misery is misery. Once numbness set in it wasn't so bad, though.

Additionally, being over six feet tall also meant that my knees were digging into the seat in front of me... A miserable experience for not one but two people.

I still have a strict travel order from those days for my assistant... Her only firing offense would be to book a middle seat for me on a flight.  This makes the flying experience miserable for all three people in my row, plus the person in the seat in front of me.

On one five hour flight back from Boston, a giant football player of a man and I scored seats in the bulkhead.  Our legs were fine, but we had the delicate dance of where to put elbows and knees and shoulders. After we hit turbulence which threw us both around, he turned to me and said, "Hi, I'm... I thought I ought to introduce myself because I think you may now be carrying my child!" We both laughed somewhat miserably.

Now that I'm a bit smaller, I fit into the seats without people around me giving me the eye, and the belt buckles just fine.  I carried the extender around for a while anyway just in case I magically ballooned to my former weight as I boarded.

 

The thing I am most grateful for in a really concrete way about this getting healthy stuff is that I buckle myself into a plane seat and have slack on the belt.  I text my trainer pretty much every time just to give him a long distance hug for his part in this happiness.