Man, whenever i get on a plane my skin gets all dry and bumpy and itchy and then my stomach isn't quite right for hours. How do you survive the toils of travel?

-- Anonymous, November 15, 1999

Answers

I don't mind traveling, I even like airports in some sick way, but I hate to fly. My problem is that my ears only pop correctly about half the time. I found a new cure (besides taking pain killers as soon as I get on the plane)which is to get one of those hot towels (or a paper towel that has been doused in hot water if you happen to be in the budget seats) and put it in a cup. Put the cup over your ear. The steam does something to re-pressurize your ears. It also makes you the butt of many jokes.

-- Anonymous, November 15, 1999

I drink a ton of water on the plane. The disadvantage is that you have to pee a lot, which sucks if you're in an aisle seat. But I never get dehydrated if I remember to bring a bottle of water with me.

-- Anonymous, November 15, 1999

I also drink a ton of water. I heard once that you should drink 8oz of water for every hour that you fly. It does help my skin and my stomach. Water doesn't help my feet though. Everytime I get off a plane I look like Fred Flintstone's sister. Big, swollen feet.

-- Anonymous, November 15, 1999

Water. More water. Even more water.

I would carry four of those 500 ml. bottles of water for a trip from Providence to Heathrow via JFK... and drink them all... plus take any water offered by flight attendants... juice with breakfast... ask for seconds on the juice... drink water anytime they offer it...

Always ask (demand) an aisle seat (with all that water you will need it anyway )... Trips to the bathroom are good for you, forces you to get up and walk around and stretch... but get that aisle seat so you can get up and move around without having to climb over anybody... also, at least there is nobody on one side of you.

Don't take your shoes off... your feet will swell during the flight and you will have a hard time getting them back on. (It's okay to unlace them or even to take them off and massage your feet and put them back on, but don't leave them off for a long time.)

Fly first class... or so I've heard... but I'm always stuck back in the economy cheap seats.

Chewing gum... especially for landings... chewing helps equalize pressure in ears... I also bring a nasal spray -- usually Vicks Sinex (with phenylephrine hydrocloride) -- so that if I feel that I'm developing nasal or sinus congestion I will spray some of that a half an hour or so before landing. If you forgot to bring gum, try drinking water and/or yawning during descent.

Jet lag is always worse going from West to East... although if the flight is long enough (to or from Australia, for example) you will be hurting no matter which way you are traveling. I have never attempted to adjust to my destination time zone ahead of time. If I am going to England, for example, I would try to connect with a flight that leaves JFK in the early evening which would get me to Heathrow around 8 or 9 the next morning (which would be 4 or 5 am to my Eastern time inner clock)... I find it almost impossible to sleep on planes but I would just stay awake all day and not sleep until evening in England. If I had Monday meetings or whatever, I would fly on a Saturday night so that after getting to my hotel I would have all day Sunday to wander around London (I love wandering through the Tate Gallery, etc.), eat a relatively early dinner (a pub for fish and chips and beer perhaps, leave the spicy Indian food for another night) and then go to bed for a good long night's sleep, waking up on Monday morning working on local time and ready to go. I follow a similar procedure on most trips... when you get to where you are going, try not to take a nap, wait until local evening before you go to sleep and wake up on local time the next day.

Don't drink alcohol... don't have a drink or two at the airport bar while waiting for your flight... and pass up those drinks on the flight (easier, perhaps, on flights where you have to pay for drinks that on flights where they are free)... alcohol will have a stronger effect on you and also a stronger after effect... I will admit that I'll take wine with the dinner meal but I won't ask for seconds (on either the wine or the food)

Wear loose casual clothing... I usually wear a sports jacket with a long sleeve dress shirt and jeans. The jacket has lots of pockets (very useful) and will keep me warm in situations of excessive air-conditioning either on the plane or in airport restaurants, waiting areas, etc. and it is easy to take off when not needed for warmth... the shirt has a pocket (again, a useful thing) and I can unbutton and roll up the sleeves if too warm... Have two paperback books (they can be stashed in sports coat pockets unless they are too fat) so you can switch if one fails to hold your interest.

It is much more comfortable to fly on flights that are not full. Yeah, I know we have no control over that, but I find that mid-week early evening flights from JFK to Heathrow tend not to be full and it is nice to be able to have an empty seat next to you. (It seems as if I usually leave Heathrow around noon on a Saturday, although I think I came back mid-day in mid-week once last year, but every Heathrow to JFK flight I've been on has always been packed.) Airbus model 300's (at least the newer ones) that I've been on have been very nice, LCD panels on seatbacks for the movies instead of tv monitors hanging from the ceiling, etc. Austrian Airlines has some nice 300's, very nice service, decent food (but watch out for code share with partner airlines, my return flight turned out to be on a well-worn older 300 that belonged to Delta). I fly American Airlines to England and usually am on 767's (which are okay, although this Egyptian crash makes me a little edgy) although my last return trip from London was on a new Airbus 300, nice flight.

Don't use electronic ticketing. It sounds as if it should be convenient, but can cause problems if you have to be rerouted on a different airline... with physical paper tickets they can take care of that right there at the gate, but with electronic ticketing all of their systems don't communicate with each other so what you would have to do is go back out to the front counters, have them print you a physical ticket which you would then have to take to the other airline, etc... by which time the damned flight would have taken off... Use physical tickets and carry with you the airlines 800 number (or your travel agency if you use a big outfit like AmEx) and if they are announcing delay or cancellation of your flight don't stand in line at the gate which will take roughly an hour longer than forever, but phone the 800 number and switch your booking to an alternate flight...

But above all... bring lots of water and drink it.

-- Anonymous, November 15, 1999

My advice?

Stay home. In your own time zone, with the cats and houseplants. Don't leave. They don't want you to.

If you don't get on the jet, you cannot have jet lag.

Problem solved!

-- Anonymous, November 15, 1999

Xanax my answer fro everything in life... is Xanax!

Oh and lots of water.

-- Anonymous, November 15, 1999

I travel so much that flying no longer fazes me but there are a few things I do to make it more comfortable.

1) Find out when the most unpopular flights are and take them. You'll have a better chance of getting an aisle seat and the middle seat empty. Plus those flights are usually not as expensive. On those long flights across country it's nice to be able to spread out a bit.

2) Don't eat salty foods before you go, and drink lot's of water. Sounds obvious, yes?

3) Some airlines actually allow you to order what foods you want before hand, like anything!! Call ahead and be sure to get a meal you'll enjoy.

4) For jet lag, the best thing to do is take a sleeping pill and sleep on the plane. Then stay up until bed time in your new time zone, get a good night's sleep and you're fine.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 1999

Having flown to and from New Zealand from England about four or five times now, I know jetlag.

The best advice is to try and book your seat as an exit seat, so you have lots of leg room and some hopes of sleeping. I'm 5ft 10, and I have no hope of sleeping in a normal economy seat. The NZ - UK flight is 24 hours, and you can't last that long without sleep.

Set your watch to the time of the place you're going as soon as you get on the plane, and only sleep when it's night time at your destination. Ask the person next to you not to wake you for meals - you can always eat when you wake up, but you may not sleep again.

Wear comfortable clothes, and forget all the stuff you've heard about looking smart so you'll get upgraded at check-in ... that almost never happens. Everybody I know travels all the time, and they've never been upgraded. It's better to be comfortable.

Take your make up off straight away and put moisturiser on - the Body Shop's Vitamin E cream is very good. I used to have dreadful skin for weeks after flying, but when we headed to NZ for our wedding in March I did this, and my skin on my wedding day was the best it's been in my entire life, ever.

Take some of your own food - airplane food is foul, and will make you ill.

Take along a gameboy or something to entertain you. Better still, fly on Virgin Atlantic or a similar airline, with seat-back TVs and games.

If you really have problems sleeping on the plane, tell your doctor, so he can give you a mild sleeping tablet or two - if you're not used to taking these it will make all the difference.

And make sure you buy stuff you don't need in Duty Free, like perfume and make up. Just to get the trip off to a good start.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 1999

I don't have any further answers for jet lag, beyond what everyone else has written. Although I could share a fun story about my honeymoon -- we flew from DFW to LAX to Honolulu, and on the longish flight from LAX to HNL I never stood up. Somehow I never had to go to the bathroom or got the urge to stretch, nothing. When we landed in Hawaii, my ankles were HUGE! I was so glad I hadn't taken my shoes off, because I never would have gotten them back on. I have never seen anything like it. It was like elephantitis or something! So I swore from that moment forward I would always drink more water on planes, and get up and wander more, even if I never felt like it or needed to pee. But guess what? I DID THE SAME FRICKIN THING ON THE FLIGHT HOME! Again with the foot elephantitis. I almost had to ride in the SmartCart. What a dumbass.

So I really have no further jet lag advice for you. I do, however, have some suggestions for peeing outdoors, being quite the veteran myself. My first camping trip was probably before I could even walk! But as I've gotten older, I've noticed that you get a little more pee shy, plus kinda squeamish about stuff like pissing on your clothing or having to drip-dry. Ew. But I discovered a couple of things that have helped me over the years. Once, in high school, when my friend Judy and I were WAAAYYYY drunk, we were partying in this little park (in Austin, of course), and suddenly we both had to pee. Bad. Too bad (and too drunk!) to walk the three blocks back to her house. We were too inebriated to just pull down our jeans and squat -- not without falling on our heads, anyway. So Judy found an ingenious way to take care of this problem: there was a kind of steepish hill or incline in the park (it was night time, and the park was all grassy, which made it especially nice!), and she discovered that you could pull your jeans down, then SIT DOWN, spread your legs, hold your jeans up off the grass, and pee downhill! It worked splendidly! No tinkle in the jeans, no falling, plus if we'd suddenly been spotlighted by car headlights or something, it would've been really hard to tell what the heck we were doing exactly -- I mean, who pees SITTING ON THE GROUND?

Method #2, also discovered when too tipsy to squat (no, I really don't have a drinking problem!): If there is a car nearby, rest the tip (?) of your butt on the car's bumper. That usually works really well. (Of course, you can't exactly do this one by the side of the highway or in broad daylight or anything!) If you're in the woods and/or there are no cars around, a tree works pretty well too: rest your back up against it and lower yourself into a squatting position, like you're sitting in a chair with no bottom.

And another tip about peeing outdoors: carry kleenex in your purse at all times! (Of course, then there's the problem of how to dispose of it -- what're you supposed to do, carry baggies or something too?)

Just call me the Pee Master. Mistress. Whatever. Or, preferably, not.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 1999

Travel tips: Don't decide to wax your legs for the first time ever at 10 pm the night before a 5am, 25hr flight to the far east. (by midnight I was in a bleary haze of exhausted, desperate pain- would the horror never end?)

Don't stay awake the entire flight, arrive in the morning after 40+ hours of being awake and decide in your delirium that it would be better to just wait until nightfall to sleep. Unless you really want to get ripped off by the locals. Painting "american tourist" across your forehead probably works almost as well.

Don't have a big greasy breakfast at the hong kong airport before your 25 hour flight home unless you really do love those itty bitty airplane lavatories and pissing off a whole plane full of people queued up outside. Though being sick enough to miss a week of work when you get home and instantly dropping 15 pounds wasn't all bad.

Do tell your boss that you simply must have three weeks off to go somewhere exotic at least once in your life. Two weeks is never enough.

And absolute agreement here on the water/ move about the cabin advice.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 1999