Day 2, Wednesday, April 21, 2015

The plane ride from Hell. Sort of. I only got about 45 minutes sleep last night if I was lucky from Boston to Dublin, but that wasn’t the bad flight. I was so looking forward to getting a couple of hours of sleep in on my flight from Dublin to Alicante. But it was booked on Ryanair, perhaps the most cramped airline in the world, with seats that do not recline and no pockets in front of the seat to hold things.

The main trouble with this flight, though, was that it was loaded with drunken Dublin women heading to Benidorm to party and a bunch of drunken men on a stag party jaunt. They were all feeling it already when they got on the flight at 10:00 in the morning, and by the time they got off two hours later they were all drunk.

In spite of that I fell asleep pretty quickly, before the plane even left the runway, I was so exhausted. Suddenly I felt myself being tapped on the shoulder. The woman sitting next to me needed to pee. So I woke up and stood up to let her out, and again to let her back in. I nodded off again. I got tapped again. The woman next to the window now needed to go. This happened four other times! I couldn’t believe it! Then all at one almost every person on the plane started shouting at once; like this whole gaggle of women shouting across the plane to each other, and the men getting rowdier with each passing kilometer. I put my headphones on to block out the noise and I couldn’t hear my musivc; they were just too loud. Then they were standing in the aisles in a long line to the lavatory, literally leaning over me and yelling over my head to each other. If I had been in a better mood and less exhausted I probably would have gotten caught up in the spirit of it all. But they just kept getting drunker as the plane ride flew on. I needed sleep so bad.  I’d rather pay a lot more money than ever fly Ryanair again, especially from Dublin, on a trip anything over an hour. Finally, an if-you-can’t-lick-‘em-join-‘em thought came to me and (without imbibing, myself) I struck up a conversation with the two 25-year-old women next to me, while they slurped down their vodka and 7-Ups and wine, respectively. They were actually very nice. One of them swears she will read Somebody Should Have Told Us! when she returns from the den of iniquity of Spain called Benidorm. And I believe she will—if she remembers anything.