I am a good traveler in the same way that an 8-month-old child is a good traveler. If I a get everything I want, the exact instant that I want it then all is well. If not ... it's not.

I have previously discussed with you the necessity of a bulkhead seat in coach on overseas flights: There is no one in front of you, and the people inside of you can get out without your having to stand up.

Like domestic flights, you can't have all your stuff around your feet at the bulkhead. You have to put it all in an overhead compartment (where items have a tendency to shift during flight) and you can't get to the overhead compartment until the plane has reached 10,000 feet.

The difference between domestic and overseas travel in this regard is: On a domestic flight by the time you get your stuff down; use it; then put it back up for landing, it wasn't worth taking it down in the first place.

On an overseas flight, however, you take off; get to the required altitude; get your stuff down; use your computer for the full 27 minutes until the battery runs dry; put it back up; have a glass of wine ($4.00 in coach on overseas trips now); watch a movie; look disparagingly at your meal; take a nap; watch a part of another movie; look at your watch (which you have remembered to change to the time zone in which you will be landing) and note that there are STILL three hours to go; have the flight attendant pick up the meal which doesn't look any better an hour later; and sigh deeply that however much it might cost to move eight feet to the Business Class cabin you would gladly pay it right this second.

And that's if you're in a bulkhead seat.

If, like me, you are in the row BEHIND the bulkhead row everything in the previous paragraph is still valid except you have the additional problem of not being able to type on your laptop because the seat in front of you is 1.7 angstroms in front of your nose so you can't open the laptop's cover all the way; and, just as you get settled, the woman in the window seat decides - in spite of your clearly stated instructions to her prior to takeoff that everyone in your row should go to the lavatory before they closed the cabin door - she has to get out.

Here is a photo of the corner of the seat in front of me:

Note, that I had to use the closeup setting on my camera to get this into focus.

Anyway, I had called Delta asking about the availability of bulkhead seating for the Mullings Director of Standards & Practices and myself.

I was told that bulkheads are reserved for airport check-in case a person with a teeny-tiny little baby needs the extra space; or if a person of, um, girth needs the extra space.

When we got to Dulles airport I asked the agent he would seat us in the bulkhead on the flight from Cincinnati to Paris. He told me we had to request the bulkhead at the airport from which the plane was actually taking off.

So, when I got on the regional jet for the flight from Washington to Cincinnati I was already in an excellent mood.

When we got into Cincinnati at about 5:40 pm, we stopped on the taxiway because a huge thunderstorm had settled in over beautiful downtown Florence, Kentucky which is where the Cincinnati airport is located.

The pilot said that because of the threat of lightning, "ramp operations have been suspended" and we should just sit there until ramp operations were resumed.

This is the way it looked out of my window:

I had misread my itinerary and so I thought our onward flight left at 6:10 pm. If we had to sit and wait until the rain, rain went away; then had to do that transfer from the commuter terminal to the main terminal on one of those buses; then had to walk all the way down to Gate 5; we were in danger of missing the flight.

I have, as you know, many, many rules. So many rules that sometimes I have to think about whether I'm violating one of them. I rarely have to think about whether someone else is violating one of my rules. I know that instantly.

A sample rule is this: I will not run through an airport.

I get to airports in plenty of time so as not to have to run to catch my flight; and if the airline can't deliver me to my connecting flight without me running to catch it, it will leave without me.

I was thinking about this as I was poking that dope college kid in front of me and telling him to be quiet. I was also thinking that if we missed the flight to Paris, we would simply go back to Washington and wish the newlyweds well from our side of the Atlantic Ocean because there would not be another flight until the next day and we would miss some of the activities and, and, and...

The truth is, we would have gone the next day.

As it happened, our Paris flight didn't leave until 6:50 which meant we had plenty of time.

We went to Gate 5 and I inquired about the availability of a bulkhead seat. I was told they were all taken.

Drat.

We got on and we were in the seats just behind the bulkhead. The MD of S&P was in the aisle seat in the middle group; I was in the aisle seat across in the group on the starboard side of the plane.

The three bulkhead seats in front of me were empty.

This was a puzzlement. If the bulkhead seats were held for people who showed up at the airport, and I had shown up at the airport and asked for them, how could they still be empty?

Well, I thought, maybe people with teeny-tiny little babies, or people of girth had informed the airline of their special needs and these seats were being held for them.

HOWEVER. If, because of the bad weather, they missed this flight then the seats would be empty and I could slide right on in there.

I began rooting for flight delays.

Then I started thinking about how I would feel if I had a teeny-tiny baby and I was taking him or her to Europe so that their grandma and grandpa could see him or her for the first time and I missed the flight by five minutes because a thunderstorm had parked itself over the airport and, because I had a teeny-tiny little baby, I didn't even have the option to run through the airport even if I wanted to.

I made myself cry.

And I stopped rooting for flight delays.

As it happened a French woman came and sat in the bulkhead aisle just before they closed the cabin doors. I walked around and sat down in the window seat in the same row. When I did that, the woman who was in the middle seat in my row moved to the aisle.

After takeoff, I was just settling in when a flight attendant arrived with a bassinet which hooks on to the wall; along with a woman and a teeny-tiny little baby. The flight attendant said that this was the only bulkhead which had the bassinet attachment, but I could stay where I was as the mom would sit in the middle seat.

However, this meant I couldn't get out without waking the mother and the teeny-tiny little baby and there was a high probability the T-TLB would wake up during the night and I didn't want to take the chance that the mother was breast feeding.

So I went back to my original seat, after first convincing the woman who was now in my seat that she had to move back to the middle - or she could move to the window seat.

She chose the latter course, so it all worked out in the end.

A short piece about the meal.

You will remember that I brought a container of nuts. This, as it turned out, was a good thing. When the flight attendants came through they asked if I wanted chicken or beef. I said, "Chicken."

This is what appeared:

If you strip off the very, very appetizing plastic layer over that red thing, you find that you have been served lasagna.

When I poked through the lasagna looking for the chicken, I came up empty. I asked the flight attendant what part of this was chicken. She must have been married because she gave me A LOOK of her own and told me that was what the manifest had said.

I was not going to eat the meal because of the relatively high carbohydrate count of lasagna, I asked her if she could take it back.

She told me, as she pushed the cart past me, that she had no place to put it.

I said, "OK," then got up, took my little plastic plate and walked through the curtains ahead of me, into business class. She chased me up the aisle saying, "Sir! Sir!"

I walked to the galley, put my teeny-tiny little tray down, turned toward the flight attendant and said, "I found a place."

I walked back to my seat catching the eye of the MD of S&P. She wound up, checked the runners at first and third, went into particle accellerator mode zipping it around until it gained enough strength to simulate the Big Bang, and gave me a nuclear version of THE LOOK and said, "You're lucky you're not finishing this flight in a pair of plastic handcuffs."

I opened my nuts and read my book.

NEXT: Paris. I promise.

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