Wing_Nut

Fat people should stay where gravity guides them.
If you can’t fit in a first class seat you should not be flying.

Solution
Take a freight car to attend your late mother’s funeral or, get the video from relatives.

Personal Hygiene Is Important
If you can afford a first class ticket, you can afford a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo. A toothbrush and toothpaste are also highly recommended.

Solution
Take time to shower before entering a giant cigar tube with 200 other people for five hours.

Old people should not travel
If you’re confused by security checkpoints and gate numbers, stay home and spare the rest of us your dementia driven tirades. Also, please do not feel free to share your ailments and medications in gory detail with the person seated next to you.

Solution
Watch the travel channel or get the video of your grand daughter's wedding from the relatives who chose not to drive with you in the car for 7 hours and so, stuffed you on a plane. Or, pop some more meds.

Only idiots buy Bose headphones.
These days it seems half the people on a plane are sporting Bose “quiet comfort” headphones. They haul around these giant cans with a requisite giant case stuffed with proprietary batteries and the required charger so they can listen to an IPOD the size of a pack of gum. Not only are the Bose noise canceling headsets huge and heavy, they sound mediocre with music and aren’t that great at canceling noise outside a narrow bandwidth. It’s ironic that people who think they’re sporting the latest cool technology are actually wearing a sign on their head that says “I’m clueless about technology”.

Solution
Ear canal phones are about 1/50th the size and weight, sound much better, and provide much more noise cancellation across a much broader frequency range without the need for any battery. They also draw much less power from that tiny lithium cell in your IPOD. And they’re almost invisible when they’re in use. All for about the same price as the Bose active noise cancellation sets. I use Shure E4C’s but Etymotic Research ER4P’s are excellent as are the Ultimate Ears Super.Fi 5Pro. All of these list for aound $300 but are discounted to less than $200.

 

Red Bearded Goat

The oddities of weirdo's can be half the fun of traveling by air.

But not on a 13 hour air time flight back from Korea where whole cloves of garlic are a staple for breakfast..... along with fermented cabbage.... that's when the Porto Vino comes in handy to wash down a handful of Ambien CR...

__________________
Enjoy rug burn, support lap dancing!

fergyflyer

I bought some ER4P's right before my last flight to Vegas. They just replaced my American Express, I'll never leave home without them. Excellent sound quality, easy to carry, comfortable to wear and I spent $220 so they weren't crazy expensive either.

I'm still a believer in driving. I need to go to Pittsburgh the weekend of June14th. My neice is graduating.

If I take the Cavalier and get 36 mpg the 2200 miles I drive will cost me $244 round trip. Maintenance and such is another $60. I'll need one extra night of a hotel, that will be $80 on a friday night at a Hampton Inn. Grand total is $384.

If I fly, the parking at the airport costs $15 per day. I can leave Friday night or Saturday. If I leave Friday after work, I'm going to be flying after working 10 hours in and out of the hot Florida sun. I won't be ripe, but will be in need of a shower. There won't be time to head home, so I'd need to get a motel 6 or super 8 close by for the shower. So leaving Friday night costs me an extra day of a cheap hotel and the hotel in Pittsburgh. Scratch that.

I need to be in Pittsburgh, at my brothers house by 1 pm. That means I need to make it to the Pittsburgh airport by 11am. It's an hours drive to his place.

I need a flight leaving at around 8 am. I'm 1 hour from the airport and you need to be at the airport 2 hours and 15 minutes before your flight because you need time to park at Orlando and it takes time to get to the terminal. So now I need to leave my house at 5am which means I need to get up at 4 am.

I'll have a total of 8 hours in travel time to get to Pittsburgh.

The cost is another thing. The flight is $320 roundtrip. I could get one for $210 but it has a stop and it leaves at 6:45 and doesn't get in till 11:30. So I would have 9-1/2 hours travel time. So $320. I'll have $30 parking, $97 for the rental after taxes and such, and $25 in gas. Grand total is $472.

It will cost me about $100 more to fly. I'll save 8 hours each way and I hate to be stuffed into a tube and go through all the crap you have to go through to fly anymore.

Instead I'm leaving here at 4pm. I'll beat the traffic out of Orlando and it will take me till 6:00 to get to Jacksonville. I'll stop and eat on the south side of J-Ville and avoid rush hour there. I'll drive for till midnight and make it to Charlotte North carolina and spend the night there. Saturday I'll be on the road by 7 am, 2 hours later than flying, and drive the 6 hours and 15 minutes to my brothers house.

I'll leave at around 8 pm to come back and drive for 3 or 4 hours. Get a hotel and drive the 11 or 12 hours left on Sunday and get in around 8 pm.

I'd much rather drive than fly and it's cheaper, even with $4 per gallon gas.

Wing_Nut

I'm with you on driving vs flying. Driving is enjoyable for me and I can stop anytime I want for food or to stretch. You can drive in shorts and sneakers. The only reason I fly is for business or a vacation outside the country. Unfortunately, I don't have the option of driving to the West Coast or some of our businesses in the midwest where time is critical.

As a general rule, anything under 500 miles is a drive for me. The cost of gas is not even a consideration. Flying has gotten to be incredibly frustrating. I fly first class and usually take a limo from my house to the airport and back again. I realize that's not the way most people travel but if I'm still getting depressed over air travel, I can imagine the frustration of people having to worry about parking and coach seats.

It used to be just weather that you had to worry about. Now, equipment problems are commonplace. I was caught up in the American/Continental MD80 grounding a few weeks ago. Yesterday, coming back from CA the airline I was flying posted the flight as delayed, then cancelled, then back on schedule. The inbound equipment had problems and the airline scrambled to get another piece of equipment in place, which they did eventually. But a couple hundred people were in limbo for about an hour. I was setting up alternate reservations on another airline at another airport and had a car standing by to get me there if the first flight was indeed scratched. Fun fun fun! And, at least in NY (LaGuardia, Kennedy, Newark, White Plains) air traffic is so bad that delays on the ground of an hour waiting for a gate or waiting to take off are quite common.

So, you fight through traffic to get to the airport, slog through security to be at the gate 30-60 minutes before flight time, sit on the runway for an hour. That can mean an extra 3-4 hours added to your trip time. For instance, my trip this week to Southern CA, my driver picked me up at 7:00AM for a 10:30 flight. In self defense, to reclaim as much time as possible, no one checks baggage any longer. They try to board the aircraft with all of their worldly possessions which delays boarding while the air crew confiscates all the bags that shouldn't have been brought aboard.

Nope, flying is not a bargain these days, prices aside. Even if gas goes to $10 a gallon, I'd rather drive.