A trip without our coach.... never again!

Crowe wrote:
I must be blessed when I fly. Few delays, great staff, no real issues. Even my husband, who amassed about a million miles on American, did not have a lot of issues when traveling for business. I'm wondering how many people just look for things to pick on or have unrealistic expectations. I could sit here and find all the things wrong with camping and put it in the same negative light if I so chose, but I'm choosing to look at things in a more positive manner. In short, no matter how I get there I'm still going to enjoy myself and I'm NOT HOME!

Ditto. While I'm trying to limit my travel now (this getting old thing ain't all daisies), I found a couple of simple rules made travel much easier:

- Book/deal directly with the provider
- Build in a decent amount of time between connections...even if the airline initially suggests a short connection time, ask for more. Maybe this is a leftover from (early days) when checking luggage all the way through was not common

I think it's also important that air travel is recognized as a convenience. If one has the time, energy, ability to drive...go for it. But if one needs to go to Hawaii (alternative to flying is a long boat ride) or across country (i.e. Texas to Alaska....a 6 day drive at fastest), flying is the only alternative. I remember a sense of wonder (after a few years of making the trip in DC-4's, DC-6's, and similar) when Alaska and Western offered jet service that would go ALL THE WAY from Anchorage to Seattle WITHOUT STOPPING.

In recent years my window of drive vs. fly has expanded to 6-8 hours (if I can drive there in 6 hours, I'll drive vs. fly) and in what I hope is the near future of retirement, that window will expand to probably 15 days, but there are still circumstances and destinations that are best achieved by flying. Even with all the time in the world, there are limits to where one can drive.