The battle of travel | Ann Oxrieder

Published 2:24 pm Sunday, February 19, 2012

I miss travel agents. For those too young to remember, these were people who spent their time finding you the best flights and quaint, undiscovered hotels, so you didn’t have to turn vacation planning into a full-time job while accumulating unpaid overtime.

Another confession: my husband and I are not as flexible as we were back then.  We will not fly, say, from Seattle to Zanzibar to arrive in Los Angeles, for the sake of a special, low-priced fare.

My husband and I are planning a trip to Spain and would enjoy a stopover in Iceland for a few days.  We’ve signed up for a tour and are responsible only for our flights. How hard could it be to book airline tickets? I turned to a karate dictionary to illustrate the challenges.

Let’s start with the original meaning of karate: empty hand. This word describes my condition after devoting a good part of January to searching on-line for flights. I haven’t found the translation for empty bank account, but could have used it had I paid the $6,000 per person offered this week on one website advertising bargain flights.

Maegeri – front kick — reminds me of the blow I felt to the belly when I learned that my one gazillion air miles would not get me anywhere on the days I selected. Kaiten – spin around – aptly represents my reaction to finding out that I could use my air miles on another airline, but that the fees and surcharges for my “free tickets” to London amounted to more than $1,400.

My only courses of action seem to be 1) rei — bow — before my opponent (my computer); 2) hajime – begin — as in begin again tomorrow;  3) apply renzoku waza — a combination of techniques: and 4) if all else fails, try sokuto kebanashi — a side kick to the middle — of my computer screen.

Ann Oxrieder has lived in Bellevue for 35 years. She retired after 25 years as an administrator in the Bellevue School District and now blogs about retirement at stillalife.wordpress.com/.