Margaret Hopkins Wins
Travel Humor Essay Contest

Dave Fox and Inkwater Press sponsored a contest recently to find the funniest travel disaster story. The assignment: Write an essay of 900 words or less about your most terrible travel tale. The prize: a backpack full of travel goodies and autographed copies of Dave's books, Getting Lost and Globejotting, as well as his audiobook CD, The Fox that Quacked.

We received lots of entries, covering destinations from Paris to Prague, from Belize to Kazakhstan. In the end, however, we selected as the winner a story that takes place on a plane ride to Florida.

Margaret Hopkins of Brookfield, Illinois, was the author of the story, and an innocent victim in her tale, in which she tried to help out a lazy passenger and got blamed for whacking another passenger on the head instead. It was an embarrassing situation at the time. We hope the laughs from Dave's books will ease Margaret's suffering.

Here's Margaret's winning entry:

Excess Baggage

By Margaret Hopkins

I wasn't trying to kill the women, despite what they may have thought. And, in the nanosecond during which the incident happened, I speculated that the most I would have been charged with was involuntary manslaughter.

It's those damn airplanes. Like adjustable rate mortgages and fish tacos, airplanes are just a bad idea. I suppose that given what happened that day as I prepared to white-knuckle my way to Florida, things could have been worse.

The line of people making their way down the center aisle of the pre-flight plane stopped and started as people scrambled to get their luggage into the overhead compartments. Many struggled with suitcases the size of Volkswagons so there was some delay in getting to my seat. They pulled and pushed and grunted and groaned until their belongings were stored above. As I came upon my assigned seat the lady seated next to the window in my row gave me an apologetic, "What can I do?" look. On the floor in front of my seat was her suitcase which prevented me from sitting.

The progress down the aisle had slowed and a voice from behind me pointed to the suitcase and said to its owner, "Heave it here, sister! We'll get that baby up there for you!" She patted me on the back so hard I thought a lung would collapse. When I turned, I saw that the bellowing voice belonged to a tall muscle-bound blonde woman. My row-mate slid her suitcase over to the aisle so Lumberjack Lucy and I could hoist it to the overhead compartment. I was taken aback at not only being unwillingly recruited to participate in this folly but also because I was sure my row mate was traveling with cement blocks in her suitcase. Of course, getting the suitcase into the overhead compartment was like getting the ugly stepsister's foot to fit into the glass slipper. Lucy, frustrated at the difficulty we were having, gave it an old heave-ho. This, though testimony to Lucy's superior biceps, did nothing but cause the suitcase to shoot out of the compartment and onto the heads of the two women in the row behind mine. They appeared to be out cold.

At seeing the results of her heave-ho-ing, Lucy shot past me and continued down the aisle. There I stood, alone, as the surrounding passengers, all seated now, looked at me with the same stare Lincoln's fellow theater-goers surely gave John Wilkes Booth. Even my row mate, owner of the murder weapon, shrank in her seat and looked out the window as if she had nothing to do with the whole sordid affair.

A flight attendant was summoned and managed to stir the two victims. A welt began to appear on one of the women's heads and I noticed they both were as pale as milk. Ice packs were brought. Names and addresses were obtained for the "incident" report. After relating the events that led to the mishap and providing my information, I was sternly told, like a school child who had just eaten the class pet, to take my seat. The flight attendant and the captain, who, at this point, had been summoned to the scene of the crime, all recommended to the two women that paramedics be called.

"Will this delay take-off?" one of the women shakily asked.

"Don't worry about that, ma'am," said the captain. "We'll sit here all day if that's what it takes!"

Again, with the hateful looks from my fellow passengers. At least John Wilkes Booth could make a run for it. I was stuck there. I looked over at window-seat lady and snarled at her, "This is exactly why I check my luggage!"

But luck was on my side. Within 10 or 15 minutes the two women decided they did not need to see the paramedics but that they would continue with the ice packs for a while. The plane took off and though I was off the hook, I couldn't take the guilt. Blame it on those nuns. About a half an hour into the flight I wrote my name, address and phone number on a piece of paper and turned to speak to them over the back of my seat. I said my "sorry's" and volunteered to pay for any medical expense incurred due to the incident (I could just hear my husband: "You WHAT?!!!")

They were more civil than I would be had someone chucked a suitcase filled with cement blocks at me.

They both smiled and assured me that they knew it was an accident and that they both felt they would be fine and that there was nothing further I could do. I'm sure it was all that good karma I'd built up.

"I do have one request, though," said one of the women.

"Name it," I said, happy to be emotionally, morally and, I hoped, financially, off the proverbial hook.

The woman looked at her fellow victim then back at me. I tried not to look at the welt that had formed in the center of her forehead, like a third eye.

"Can you please stay in your seat until I get off the plane?" she asked.

I thought that was a reasonable request.