My Family's Worst Travel Experience

As a former active military member, one of my best privileges was the opportunity to see the world. I have not seen all the countries I wanted to visit but I definitely frequented some of the most interesting places in the world like the Vatican City in Rome, Italy; the beautiful island of Bali in Indonesia; many wonderful cities in Japan; the inexpensive deals in the open markets of Hongkong and Singapore, and many other amazing regions of the world that I could have not seen if I did not enlist in the U.S. Navy. My wife actually gave birth to our first child, a beautiful girl we named Gianne Marie, in citta di Napoli (city of Naples) in Italy, before we returned to the east coast of the United States, specifically in Virginia Beach, Virginia. And I could say that our trip to Virginia was the worst one I had experienced, together with my family.

Like always, after spending almost three years in Sardinia, Italy, it was time for me and my dependents to transfer to a different duty station; back to the U.S. Everything was going smoothly as planned. We shipped all our properties through the assistance of Navy housing office and obtained plane tickets for the three of us. So to speak, the government purchased my daughter's tickets to guarantee her seats in all of our scheduled flights from our departure in Italy until we touch ground in the United States. Supposedly we should not experience any hassle with our flights, particularly our daughter, but we sure had some troubles, seating wise.

From our initial flight up to the very last plane we boarded, the flight attendants asked us to free up the seat of our daughter, Gianne. I had to pull out her seat assignment from my documents each time we got situated. Why did we experience such annoying behavior? Was it because the airlines really wanted to ensure that my whole family was issued proper seating assignments or was there another reason outside of that scenario? Of course, there was. The airlines simply wanted to earn more that they had to annoy us by telling my wife to just put the carrier of our daughter on her lap throughout the duration of each flight, so that they could give that seat to another paying customer.

We were so happy when we reached our final destination: No more annoyances, no more disturbances from anybody. We were home and everybody spoke English. But most important of all, we made it home safely and the frustrations turned into beautiful smiles; after all, our flights from Italy to the United States were all full of adventure and excitement. My wife and I even made jokes with each other that the flight attendants would approach us to ask if we could free up Gianne's seat on each of our flights ... sure enough, they did!