May 6, 2008

• Travel Time

  So yeah….
  
  I’m going to Europe. The south of Spain, to be specific, right next to the Rock of Gibraltar. Which is where my mother lives. My mother– a.k.a. “Mommie Dearest”– is 86, and I expect she doesn’t have all that many years remaining, in this dimension.
  
  I’ve been talking about going for a while, but have put it off, and put it off…. “officially” primarily for financial reasons. It’s expensive to go… and when you’re self-employed, going away also means you incur the “cost” of not having an income while you’re out… even while the rent and the electric meter keeps ticking.

  Anyway, on May 18th, I go off to visit the parental unit until May 29th.
  
  The price of airfare– especially on international routes– is a crapshoot. What’s available, and at what price, varies from day to day, and from company to company. Last week, airfare from Seattle to Gibraltar ranged between $848 and $2425, for the same fare, with the same carriers, on the same days, but booked through different web sites.
  
  It always amuses me how the low priced tickets are always priced and listed in search results, but they aren’t actually available. It’s also interesting (but not amusing) how the “fuel surcharge” added as “other fees and taxes” takes a $933 fare and turns it into a $1400 fare. Ah, let’s hear it for $120 oil.
  
  I was quite impressed with the ticket consolidator shop whose website I booked my fare from. Within a few hours of buying the ticket, there was a voicemail, from a real living human being, making sure I was aware of the airport change in London, and aware that there would be an overnight stay there, as well. I can’t say I have ever noticed one of the “big” travel sites give a rats rear quarters about such things.
  
  The irony of all this is that it was the need to make this trip (rather, the cost associated therewith) that was partly responsible for my recent disappearance. I needed to make the money, which meant blogging/web time needed to be stopped and turned into “income time.” Although I don’t get paid hourly, my income is highly correlated with the number of hours I put in. If I were willing to put in 100 hours a week, I’d actually become quite well off.

  Recently, I have been working 100 hours a week– for various reasons– and it is not a life.
  
  I’d be hard pressed to say that I have ever had “money in savings” for occasions like this.
  
  Irony number two is that Mommie Dearest lives in an $800,000 golf course condo in one of the swankest gated communties in southern Europe. Suffice it to say that our perceptions of money, and what it takes to get some, are just “a leetle different.”

  It’ll be fun, though. Gibraltar has one
  of the skeeriest airports on the planet… the runway basically starts
  in the Mediterranean and ends in Algeciras Bay, and the 4-lane main road between Gibraltar and Spain
  crosses the middle of the runway. Not under, not around… across. Traffic stops at the red light when
  the 11:05 from London lands. The “no margin for error” runway, combined with unpredictable swirling winds around “The Rock” and large flocks of sea birds makes this one of the commercial airports with the highest rate of aborted landings in the world. Before they lengthened the runway out into the bay, the only commercial planes allowed to land there were fitted with a trio  of “air braking” parachutes in the tail section. Think of landing a 737 on a permanently anchored aircraft carrier, and you get the picture. It’s a ROCK. There’s no flat land.
   

  • 12:11 pm
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