The Underground and his family leave tomorrow AM for a weeklong trip to Hawaii, and before you start rolling your eyes and going all “oohhhhh, Mr. Fancy Pants goes on a vacation, oohhhh” on me, read this:

I’d rather be home.

And for a few very good reasons.

  1. I need some time to fish, and there’s still hope I could catch the tail end of the Dying October Caddis bite
  2. I am the walking, talking embodiment of the Pasty White Guy, and me on a tropical beach is like a metal dish in a microwave (it’s mostly ugly noises and sparks and suffering)
  3. Any time you leave the mountains in winter, you risk coming home to a six-foot high ice wall where your driveway used to be
  4. I need a vacation

This last bullet might confuse some of you. For clarity, I’ll ask you this: when’s the last time you arrived home after a trip with a three year-old less tired than when you left?

I rest my case.

Enjoy Your Inflight Enema

Let’s move along to the airlines, and although I usually wait until after they’ve lost my luggage or stolen my camera or stranded us in Salt Lake City for 48 hours to complain, this time I won’t have to.

The L&T spent the extra bucks to put us all in one row in the “Economy Plus” section. Weeks later, she want back to United Airline’s website to confirm, and discovered they had moved us to three scattered seats around the airplane.

Hardly ideal for people traveling with a three year-old, and a little confusing since we had spent the extra money to sit in the Plus section.

Lady surfer

Now the L&T won't even let me take up surfing

We never did get a cogent explanation, but after an strongly worded inquiry by someone with more frequent flier miles than the New York Yankees (put together), we got — and great big tears of gratitude are welling up in my eyes as I type this — two of the three seats we originally paid for.

And they say customer service is dead.

Apparently the airlines are willing to charge you extra for the Plus section, but because they’re greedy bastards they’ll happily repossess the seats we’d already paid for (they get a few extra dollars for the aisle).

This means they’re perfectly fine sitting my three year-old next to strangers who may not have an affinity for two-legged hummingbird types who announce their need to “make poopy” only seconds before the act actually occurs.

Thus do we redefine “family friendly.”

At least there is some good news.

Well, OK. There really isn’t.

The airlines pretty comprehensively suck, and terminal security mostly sucks, Donald Trump (unrelated, but fun) wholly sucks, and my solution to all that is…

Stay here.

Death Before Disembarking

Sadly, visionaries like myself are rarely appreciated while alive (between the beach and the airline, death could strike as early as next week), so we’re going to Hawaii.

We’ve got a house sitter who is aware of Wally the Wonderdog’s recent trials (we haven’t seen a repeat of the seizure), and I’m supposed to have Internet access (let’s hope it’s not provided by a subsidiary of United Airlines), and we’ll see.

Just in case I lose touch with the outside world, Happy Christmas and New Years to all the Undergrounders.

Given the trials we’ve enjoyed this December, it’s likely the Undergrounders represent my only real connection to sanity, and while that thought should send you stampeding for the exits, rest assured we’re looking for a return to normalcy by the second week in January.

Assuming, of course, United doesn’t sell our seats to someone else while we’re still over the Pacific.

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