As much as I dislike air travel, you really do get a lot of interesting experiences riding on airplanes.  We had a couple flights today on our journey to meet up with the bus in New York.  Our airline of choice today was Southwest.  If you’re familiar with Southwest, you know that there are no assigned seats.  You board in groups A, B, and C, and it’s a free-for-all to determine who gets what seat.  Today we were fortunate enough to be in group A, so we all got window seats.  The tricky part about being in group A is protecting your personal space once you find that special seat.  Nobody wants to be crowded on a flight, so you find ways of discouraging people from sitting near you.  Most of us went with the time-tested method of putting your jacket or carry-on in the seat beside you.  This works for taking up the middle seat, but today Bo experimented with a method that not only made the seat beside him unappealing, but also his entire row.  Some of you may have seen his twitpic of this earlier today.  He pulled his hoodie low over his eyes and basically tried to look mentally unstable.  This approach almost worked perfectly, but he ended up being the second to last person with a row-mate.  Not bad for the first try.  I’m sure we’ll perfect the technique on future flights.  My row-mate was a Canadian traveling to Florida with a buddy.  After a few minutes of casual conversation I found out they were heading down for a NASCAR race.  I didn’t know that Canadians even knew about NASCAR!  Nothing against NASCAR, or Canadians for that matter…the two just don’t seem like the most obvious pairing to me.  We hurriedly changed planes in Chicago because our first flight was delayed, so we had to run to catch our connection.  Now the seating hierarchy was reversed on us.  It was up to us now to determine whose space we were going to invade.  I was lucky enough to get an aisle seat at the very front of the plane.  Plenty of legroom, and I get to be the first one off the plane.  Pretty ideal for me.  Pretty soon after we took off, I noticed that the guy in Bear’s row was reading a fitness magazine.  It didn’t really seem that odd to me until he started doing crunches in his seat.  It had never occurred to me to blast my six-pack while riding on a plane.  I think this could start a whole new fitness movement.  The next time I fly, I’m gonna see if the flight attendant will let me do some dips and lunges in the aisle.

- Joe