Travel woes

The big downside to living in Fairbanks is that its so far from everywhere - except wilderness. Its really an isolated community. Anchorage is 6-7 hours away by car, and there is basically nothing in between. Just getting to the state capital (Juneau) is quite an adventure. If you want to get there you have two options: taking a 2+ hour flight (if you're lucky you can get a direct flight) or driving through Canada and catching the ferry from Haines. That takes about 15 hours, about the same as driving from Minneapolis to western Montana. And if you want to visit the U.S....

Of course, the airlines aren't exactly trying to make travelling any more enjoyable. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the airline companies' current plight. About a month ago I purchased tickets to fly from Fairbanks to Minneapolis to Helsinki to Fairbanks over winter break. I recently decided to attend a geophysics conference in San Francisco that ends the day before I was scheduled to leave Fairbanks. Changing the ticket sounded like a hassle, so I asked if I could just cancel one leg of the ticket (2 months in advance). Turns out you can't do that without canceling the entire ticket and losing all that money. Somehow that doesn't make sense: I told them that I would just forfeit my seat, and that they could give it to somebody else (and charge them for it), but the airline wouldn't do it. My only option was to change the ticket - at first "they" tried to charge me $800 to do that, since the cost of the flight went up. The same flights, one month later, cost $800 more. Can you imagine if buses operated like that? Anyway, enough ranting. We got it squared away (minus lunch money for a couple months).

I'll be in Minnesota December 11-15 (arriving early on the 11th, leaving midday on the 15th). Leave your calendars open, it's gonna be wild.