Remember when I half-promised-sorta that I was going to post several blogs about my air travels in one week. That was cute, wasn’t it? Two weeks later…One of my favorite parts of any plane experience, is the safety instructions. It’s fun to see the first time flyers trying to remember everything. You can almost hear their frantic eyes saying, “Wait. What do I do in the unlikely event of a water landing? Should I be taking notes? Why is everyone so calm?” Then there’s the frequent flyers who rarely even quiet their conversations to “turn their attention to the flight attendant who has some important safety instructions for them.”

Then there’s me. And the whole time I’m watching the safety instructions, I’m thinking about the language choices. For example, when they say, “In the unlikely event of a water landing…” what exactly is unlikely? Is it unlikely that the plane will go down and have to make a water-landing? Or is it more unlikely that said water-landing would be successful? When I’m not thinking about the language choices used on flights, I’m thinking about how much it would suck to crash.Anyways, I thought it would be fun to start my air travel series with a post that included photos since I haven’t done that before. You should know, however, that these were taken with my iPhone and then cropped (read: these photos are crappy). Still I think you’ll be able to enjoy some of the images for the same reasons I did.

I took these photos on a flight from Lafayette, LA to Atlanta, GA (my connection to get back to Baltimore). I walked onto the plane and found that my seat was in the very back of the plane next to the bathroom. Row fourteen (directly behind row twelve–we need to discuss missing 13 soon). I sat next to an elderly gentleman that seemed to be a frequent, but anxious flyer. I then sat down, pulled the safety materials from my seat-back pocket, and took pictures while I laughed. The gentleman did not speak to me for the entire flight.

Next time I’ll talk more about my interactions with strangers on my flights–their life stories, their advice about long distance relationships and love (that turned out to be spot on), and the many ways I fail at exiting conversations I no longer want to be a part of.