Why I don't fly so much anymore

For years, I was the most frequent leisure traveler of nearly anyone I knew who also worked for a living. So, what’s going on? Why am I not updating this blog very often? Have I been grounded?

I started this travel blog right before I quit traveling. I didn’t quit entirely – but certainly I cut down on the number of vacation and leisure trips that used to dot my calendar like bumps on seersucker. Why? I went back to work, which entails a fair amount of business travel, which I don’t like to write about. And we bought a house in the mountains 80 miles away from Seattle. That limits both my opportunity and appetite for getting on a plane and flying away for fun.

Lately, I’ve been thinking I’ve been limiting myself too much. I haven’t been to South America in four years. Ben and I never go to Hawaii anymore; if we want to go someplace warm, it’s too easy to slip down to Palm Springs where we already have clothes, golf clubs, bikes – everything we need. No luggage required.

But as I say, I recently started to wonder if this is healthy. I came across a travel diary my friend Janet gave to me four or five years ago. Empty. On a desk, I uncovered a beginner’s guide to Slovak – evidence of a once-planned-then-cancelled trip to the mountains of Slovakia and the beer gardens of the Czech Republic. Janet has been e-mailing me lately about fantasies of a quick trip to Zuleta in Ecuador. Ben and I picked up brochures about golf and wine tasting around Mendoza, Argentina. It’s starting to get to me…I need some air under my feet and some serious non-American cultural immersion.

Well, until the past weekend, anyway. Two consecutive maintenance-caused flight cancellations with Alaska Airlines reminded me how little fun it is to get on an airplane anymore. A flight that should have taken 2 and a half hours - at the most - turned into a 22-hour ordeal – just trying to get home from Southern California. The sleep deprivation lasted for days, and I lost my nice $300 Sennsheiser head phones along the way. And wasn’t it just the last flight from Phoenix when the airline lost my golf clubs, which were checked alongside Ben’s, which arrived fine?

It’s as if the airlines are trying to drive away traffic. And, I can’t imagine I’m alone feeling this way. When this flight-hassle fatigue is combined with the coming “depression-syndrome” ethic of non-consumption on the part of consumers, I can’t help but think the heyday of air travel in the U.S. is over. Airlines that want to stay in business pay attention to preventative maintenance (get those planes healthy!), customer service and responsiveness (please tell me why my flight is delayed four hours?), creature comforts (is it really the swine flu that mandated the removal of pillows or penny-pinching?), and convenience (don’t make me drag my checked bag across the airport for loading. Don’t you have conveyer belts?) . But I don’t see that happening.

The TSA’s arbitrariness and rudeness seems to have lessened lately. But undoing that negative isn’t going to be enough when obliterated by increasingly budget-minded airline stinginess that leads to more discomfort and more and more delays.

Thank goodness Ben and I decided to drive to Canada for our big golf trip this summer instead of flying. We may actually get there on time. And we may actually have our clubs when we arrive.