7 Activities to Help You Get Through an Extremely Long Flight
As much as we love to travel, our flight is the least exciting part of our itinerary. Honestly, we can get down with short flights, but it is especially irritating when your airtime hours reach the double digits.
If you're lucky, you can sleep through the entire duration of your trip. However, it will likely be difficult to comfortably snooze in that cramped upright position.
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Are you preparing for a 10, 12 or even 16-hour flight in the near future? Continue reading to discover the best activities to pass the time.
Read a Book
Did you know it can take you less than five hours to finish a book under 350 pages? A long flight is the perfect place to binge a novel in one sitting. After all, you're suspending in the air with no escape for extended hours. You have no cellular signal, and it's bad etiquette to loudly socialize with your travel partner. In other words, you have zero distractions you'd have in the comfort of your home reading nook. In fact, you may even be able to make it through multiple books.
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Listen to an Audiobook
Because people naturally talk more slowly than they read, audiobooks often are triple the length of books. For example, Fourth Wing, just over 500 pages, has an audiobook recording of 21 hours. You won't even have enough time to listen to the whole story! However, you'll probably get to the climax, leaving you on a cliffhanger until your returning flight.
And if you don't want to commit to an audiobook, podcasts can be a great alternative.
Listen to Music
We are the kind of people who will make hours-long playlists. Like, some of them have 24 hours-worth of songs. That said, we've never sat down and listened to them from beginning to the end. A flight is a great setting to experiment. And you can multitask this while doing one of the other ideas on this list.
Have a Movie Marathon
Like with books, we have a tendency to get easily distracted while watching a movie at home. There is so many things to simultaneously consume our minds. The airplane, in a silly way, is like a miniature movie theater. You don't have much to do other than stare at your screen, making it very easy to immerse yourself in the fictional world.
For extra points, why not watch a series? When you have hours in the air, there is a chance you could make it through every movie in the Twilight saga, The Hunger Games franchise and more.
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Plan Your Itinerary
On a last-minute trip, you may feel like you didn't have enough preparation to finalize the details. Flights are basically glorified "do-nothing" time, so use it to start scheduling out your itinerary. If your airline offers wifi, you can also explore new activities to add to your to-do list.
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Get to Work
So, does your plane offer Wi-Fi? You could save a vacation day by doing business as usual on the plane. To our surprise, the internet connection has been great on international fights. It's probably because most people are sleeping, so everyone isn't fighting for the best signal.
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Take a Lap
When you're in the air for more than six hours, you're bound to get antsy. Thankfully, it is not frowned upon to walk around to stretch your legs. Try your best to do it during a slow period. Maybe, everyone is already asleep. Then, you won't feel pressured to sit back down before you're ready. Plus, this is much-needed to prevent leg cramps and keep your blood flowing.
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