Great stories! Here's mine...

A friend and I were flying BGI-YYZ, on a Wardair A310-300, back in pre-9/11 days when employees were quite welcome to ride in the flight deck.

A couple of hours into the flight we were approaching Bermuda, and could see these HUGE thunderheads ahead of us, which must have reached in excess of 40,000 feet. The F/O asked us to make sure our shoulder belts were on, then requested that the F/A's be seated.

Presumably the Captain had requested and received clearance for some variance from the intended flight path. He disengaged the auto-pilot, and we were in for the ride of our lives! The Captain and F/O appeared to be picking and choosing the thunderheads that they would fly between, and despite being buffeted intensely, it was like being in a high-tech video game. For the best part of an hour our altitude and headings were all over the place, my friend Anne and I were in parts thrilled and appalled at the skill and ...was it fun??... the pilots were displaying.

We assumed this was what an experienced pilot might call a "light chop", but upon landing in Toronto, the aircraft was taken out of service for a deep cabin cleaning, and according to our friends and co-workers seated in the passenger cabin, the turbulence was EXTREME, the meal service was abandoned completely, barf bags were in use in every second seat.

Moral of the story, it's always best to be in the "driver's seat".