Ummm…
Wellll…
‘Nuff said.
Tag: Travel
Speed Bump
I saw an article about how expensive car rental has become in Yurp, but in fact it seems to have become more expensive in Britishland.
A cursory look showed me that a 7-day rental in Vienna would run about $450 (base cost before add-ons), whereas at Heathrow the same car would cost $800. Seriously?
Unlike a lot of people, I have no problem with driving in Europe or the U.K., so a rental car is always preferable to waiting for trains or buses. (Not in the cities, of course, but around the country to small towns and villages.) Even Britain’s perennial parking problems don’t really worry me, and I really prefer the freedom of the open road.
When I stayed at Free Market Towers back in 2017, I rented a car which, if memory serves, cost me about $320 per week, fully loaded (insurance etc.) and I fondly imagined that the next time I get Over There, I’d be able to afford the same.
Fat chance, at those prices.
And train travel has become prohibitive too, not just in Britishland but also in Yurp; but I’m not interested in just staying in cities (ironically, other than maybe Vienna).
So here I sit: proper fucked, as the Brits say.
Return Of The (Non) Native
Took off…
…and landed safely:
…all on the same day, after a 60-hour flight*.
“Now,” she asks me, “…exactly what day is it, and what’s the time?” Always with the difficult questions. She’s lucky I recognized her walking through the Customs gate…
*I know, I know… she says it just feels like it took sixty hours.
Bad Air
Seems as though the air travel industry is having tough times nowadays.
On Thursday, JetBlue and other carriers laughably claimed that they were canceling the flights because of weather. This was garbage, as the weather where we were (NY) was perfect. Why would they do this? If they can claim it was the weather, they don’t have to pay for your meals, your hotel—anything. (Yes, there were some scattered thunderstorms across the nation. Hardly enough to cancel 10,000 flights.)
What? You mean airlines will lie to you to save money? (In other news, politicians lie and water is wet.) And:
How does this keep happening in America, over and over? (By the way, things were no less of a disaster over Memorial Day weekend.)
Mostly it’s due to staffing shortages: pilots, crew, and air control. This is partly due to the fact that the Biden Administration mandated vaccines for pilots and other personnel, many of whom either quit or were fired for refusing. Guess what, Joe; you need pilots to fly planes.
Here’s the situation, luggage-wise, in Britishland (where they can’t blame Biden, but they can blame their own BritGov for mandating similarly moronic policies):
That’s just one airport and one baggage gate, but apparently similar scenes can be found at all Brit airports right now. What a fuck-up.
My rule of not taking checked luggage on any flight is looking better and better — and if I can’t pack sufficient clothes for a trip, I just set aside a little money to buy whatever I need Over There.
Not, mind, that I’ll be able to afford to fly anywhere for the next decade after Qantas Fucking Airlines emptied my wallet, twice in one year.
Speaking of which: New Wife gets in tonight from Oz, U.S. Immigration permitting. (That’s another whole kind of cock-up, but I’ll talk about that tomorrow.)
Never Again
It is only when one leaves America does the shattering truth emerge that as much as we hate U.S. bureaucracy and deplore its inefficiency and tortoise-like attitude, just one encounter with the Third World has us weeping with relief when all we have to do, say, is renew a driver’s license down at the local DMV.
So New Wife and I decided to deplete our savings and try to repeat our earlier, abortive attempt to visit her #1 Son and family (grandchildren!!!) in Sydney, Australia. (The first trip, of course, was nuked by Covid and the OzGov’s pathetic overreaction thereto. That only cost us $1,500 for NW’s air ticket.)
Of course, even without Covid, Straya throws all sorts of shit at anyone who might want to spend some tourist dollars to visit their poxy country (pop. 25,000) — you have to apply for a visitor’s visa (from a list of about 50 different categories) before you can even get onto an airliner. Cost of said application: ~$340 per person. However, the Dept. of Home Affairs boasts, it only takes as little as 36 hours for it to be approved (except where otherwise indicated by 
). Of course, using Covid as an excuse, the time was not 36 hours, oh no: New Wife applied in February of this year, and it arrived promptly on May 15; I applied for mine on April 1, and ATOW it still hadn’t arrived.
So I wasn’t able to get on the plane with her last Friday evening, but I was told that if I changed my flight to Sunday evening, they would help me take care of my little visa problem.
Which is where the (further) problems began. I wasn’t able to change my flight because Expedia can’t do anything if the departure time is less than 10 hours away (on Friday evening, it was about two hours away by the time I’d got home). No problem, thinks I, I’ll just go to Qantas’s website and change it there. Except that Qantas must have used the same guy to build their website as homeaffairs.gov.au — there is no way to “manage” your booking — nowhere to enter your ticket number or reservation number, nada.
Last night I discovered the following: because I hadn’t been able to change my flight, Qantas was going to take the whole fare and give me a “coupon” for $500 to use for my next flight; additional expense to fly out on Sunday night: $800.
Even worse was my visa experience. I could actually get an ETA visa (don’t ask) approved in about 20 minutes, except for a couple of teeny-weeny little problems: the Qantas mobile app downloaded onto my phone, but couldn’t open; and the visa application cost was going to be another $340, because this was a new visa application fee, you see, and no they couldn’t (okay wouldn’t) credit me for the failed visa application because they are two different visas.
Oh, and did I mention that the Sunday flight was overbooked anyway?
The hell with that. I would rather take that $1,100-odd and pay for the grandkids to come and visit me.
Hence the title of this post. Ain’t gonna happen, never, no way, uh-uh am I going to try to visit Australia ever in the future. It’s just too much frigging hassle, and expensive, to visit a place that was never high on my Wannagothere List in the first place.
It’s not like I don’t have other options; here’s one just arrived in my Inbox last night:
Cheap Flights: Dallas to London $566-$589 r/t
Don’t need a visa, either. Buy a ticket, arrive at the airport, fly eight (not seventeen!) hours, and it’s tea and sausage rolls at Greggs for brekkie the next morning.
Other destinations ditto, with local cuisine variations.
Too bad, for everyone.
I think I’ll go to the range later today and get some AK-47 practice. That’s one thing I can do that I’d never be able to do Down Under.
Landed
Okay, here’s the story of the film so far. New Wife is safely at home with her #1 Son’s family.
I am safely at home in Plano, minus the cost of a roundtrip DFW-SYD airfare and visa application cost, as well as a Qantas seat-selection fee, seat of course never having been used.
Motherfucker. I think I’ll go to the river nearby, find an angry cottonmouth snake and bite its fucking head off.