Traveling with a cold sucks

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this week, it’s how to travel with a sinus infection.

First of all, don’t do it.  Flying with a stuffy head is not cool.  That piercing feeling you feel as the plane lands is your eardrum cussing you for doing something stupid.

If you must travel for work, training in my case, with a sinus infection there are a few things you need.

1. Drugs, day time and night time.  The day time drugs will help you get through the training class with just tolerable sneezing and sniffling.  The night time drugs will help you sleep in that foreign bed.
2. Kleenex from home.  Make space in your bag for them.  When was the last time you used a Kleenex in a hotel and thought “that’s soft”?
3. Cash. You need to keep yourself hydrated and one needs cash to purchase drinks from the vending machine around the corner, or the café in the training center.
4. Sometime to keep you entertained on the plane other than a book.  I don’t know about you but I can’t read a book with watery eyes.  Fill up your listening device with the latest HR Happy Hour episode, put in the ear buds and relax; that stabbing ear pain will eventually go away.
5. A sense of humor.  The first thing I did at training was apologize for being one of Snow Whites Seven Dwarfs. If you’re traveling with a sinus infection, or any cold for that matter, you already feel like crap so you might as well laugh at yourself for looking like Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.

The best tip of all? Keep your butt at home.  No one likes to be on a plane with someone sniffling, sneezing, and coughing.

My apologies to the passengers of United Flight 5673.