Baggage 10/23/10

We leave later this morning for New York. I have had my usual battle with packing, trying to fit two weeks' worth of clothes and other stuff into a bag small enough to carry onto the airplane. I would not do this but for the new fees they charge for check-in bags. I much prefer to check my bags and tote just a small bag onto the plane with a couple of magazines, my crossword, and maybe the laptop. Now, with the new fees, EVERYONE is trying to keep ALL their luggage with them, which results in stuffed overhead bins--not to mention bruises and frayed tempers. The system is absurd. There's just as much luggage. It just gets crammed into the cabin instead of the cargo hold.

As you can tell, I'm a bit testy in anticipation of the day's travel. I'm actually rather spoiled: we're traveling first class. For $10 each. I was on the phone with a United Airlines agent a couple of months ago, looking for ways to use our mileage to upgrade from economy to business. Business, we find, is now just about what economy used to be, about ten years ago. Anyway, she kept telling me it was impossible and I kept telling her it couldn't be, and then she said, "Oh, wait a minute..." Somewhere, in some nook or cranny of her computer system, she had found this special deal which allowed us to pay $10 for our tickets and upgrade to first class, with the same amount of miles we would have used to upgrade to business. Go figure.

So we travel first class. You'd think we could afford to check our bags with this deal, but I'm just too cheap and pissed off at the system to fork out the extra $25 per bag, each way. So we'll aim to cram the first class cabin bins with our overstuffed "carry-on" bags. I'm planning to continue making entries, though perhaps less regularly, from our travels, so I may get to report to you on this experience. In the meantime, here's hoping for a bon voyage. See you in New York City...