Some of you may remember I listened to an audible book on a trans-oceanic flight a handful of years ago. Then I had to rip the 11 CDs to chapter files and give them names, so they would be in order and then use iTunes to put them in my iPod. i was a littlr rigorous but the ipod had a long battery life and might have played the whole 10 hours or so of the book.

This time I decided to try out audible.com and select a popular book and see if the experience works out. One good thing is that the book is downloaded to both my phone and my tablet, increasing my battery life by two. If I try it  on the plane, I’ll let you know.

Sometimes I like to listen to music. Sometimes the drone of the engines is too bothersome for music, but okay for a narrated book. Sometimes a stored movie is good. Sometimes a music-and-picture concert ripped from a DVD is good. I don’t play games, but some like that or Words with Friends (scrabble) is fun. I THINK you can WI-FI link with someone else on the plane, but I’ve never investigated that. Should work with a peer-to-peer link, if I understand the game right.

My point is you don’t know ahead of time what you’ll feel like. Sometimes it’s just catch up on lost sleep. Sometimes it’s drink coffee and talk incessantly (we’ve all had a fellow passenger who had to talk the whole flight!) and sometimes it’s doing crosswords with a pencil.

I COULD have got an audible book to teach me the Hawaiian phrases I could use.

It’s a testimonial to modern travel that most people can read on most flights. Considering the thousands of miles of ocean, that beats puking in some bunk on a 19th century sailboat for a couple weeks. I still get an odd craving for a mug of rum with a lime in it when I cross the ocean…..

Can anyone remember when the “no smoking” lights would go out and the whole cabin would light up? They were watching out for you, though, they only allowed cigarettes and no pipes or cigars. Now days people put on a nicotine patch or chew some nicarette gum.

I’m not TOTALLY off-topic here. These are things people do on longer flights. I’ll just also mention another idea.
You can do nothing.
Or if you have to get into a certain “place” you can listen to mood music, like ocean waves or frogs or rain or thunder or steam trains or jungle sounds or Peruvian flute players or sitar music or babbling brooks or crickets. But sometimes I like to drink water and do nothing (because I “CAN”). To really whoop it up, sometimes I put a little ice in the water.