The Long Journey Home

I moved to the west coast three years ago now. And every year, I've gone home for Christmas. In 2006, I found that the best time to buy tickets was in August. Plenty of flights at cheap costs with my pick of seats. The first year, I flew JetBlue. The second year, I flew Virgin America. Both, times I had a direct flight into JFK and spent a day or two with my sister before traversing to Bristol. Very good experiences overall (though prior blogs might reveal this to be a falsehood. I don't know. I try not to read my prior blogs. And neither should you. Live in the moment, people!) This year, however, I reserved my passage on US Airways. It is also the first year that I will be flying directly into Connecticut (with a connector in Philly), and the first year that there is an economic crisis afoot. I mean, there is always an economic crisis afoot in the airline industry, but now it's for real. (Seriously, as being part of the generation that has been told from the get-go that there's not enough money for holiday parties, Christmas bonuses, or 3% raises, I bet a lot of CEOs are feeling silly now.) And I'm beginning to think that my normal doom and gloom about air travel is about to get a whole lot doomier and gloomier. Case in point, my fourth phone call from US Airways.

Over the weekend, I received a voicemail from US Airways requesting that I call them back in regards to my reservation. The first time I got this call, it was about two weeks after I booked the flight. It seemed they wanted to change my connector from Chicago to Philly. Same time though, so no problem. The second phone call came about four weeks after that one saying that they wanted to bump me to a later flight. Since the AM flight out of LAX was at 6AM and now they wanted to put me on a 7:50AM flight, I took it. About three weeks after that call, my third call came to tell me that they were bumping my 3:30PM flight out of Philadelphia to 6PM. That meant a four hour layover. OOF! But I took it, because -- well, you know -- I couldn't exactly say no, could I? And now the fourth call saying that they needed to move my AM flight out of LAX again. This time to 9AM. Which, fine, right? I mean, that's one less hour in Pennsylvania. But I'm now I'm sorta freaking out that there might be all kinds of drama come flying time five days before Christmas. I was complaining about this over dinner with some friends on Monday night. To which the gentleman at the table replied, "Just hope that there's still an airline around come December." Hmm. Good point. I guess some cranky baby shenanigans on the 20th is better than cry-baby whining on the 25th. Fingers crossed.