Category Archives: TRANSPORTATION

October 4, 2013 · 2:23 pm

Bumpy flight flying between storms out of Des Moines today

much as I want to get to Boston for a family wedding this weekend, I almost wished our flight out of dsm at 7:15 am wasnt leaving on time when we boarded it a few hours ago. The weather was scary. And i tried NOt to think about that recent horrific flight on the silver screen with denzel Washington as the drunk pilot.

We waited for one storm to subside, sort of, then hustled to get off the runway before the next storm, fast approaching arrived…Flying in a small metal canister of a plane through dark clouds with lightening off in the distance wasn’t fun. Very bumpy for the first 15 minutes or so until we climbed out of the dramatic clouds into a refreshingly blue patch of sky. I bumped into the pilot in the bathroom at O’Hare and she acknowledged that the early moments of the flight were rough. But she said she respects the weather and wouldn’t have flown if it wasn’t safe. I thanked her for her service.

Leave a comment

Filed under air security, Chicago

Tagged as , , ,

September 29, 2013 · 4:03 pm

The “Southwest effect” in Des Moines – fares down but I still haven’t flown Southwest

A young man dancing, swiveling his hips. He has dark hair, short and slicked up a bit. He wears an unbuttoned band-collared jacket over a shirt with bold black-and-white horizontal stripes. Behind him, on either side, are a pair of barred frames, like prison doors.

So according to the DM Register there has indeed been a “Southwest effect” in Des Moines – i.e. fares have dropped about 6 percent since Southwest FINALLY decided to grace us with its presence. Southwest-effect-slashes-Des-Moines-prices. And that’s great! Oddly I’ve yet to fly Southwest. Up until yesterday Southwest only flew to Chicago from DSM  (twice daily). But  today it will begin flying to Las Vegas which should open up western routes to places like Tucson/Phoenix and L.A. where I need to fly. An Elvis impersonator and Vegas showgirls will be on board to kick off the new Vegas flight!

On the few occasions when someone from my family has opted to fly to Chicago (vs. drive or take the Megabus) they’ve opted for other airlines that have dropped their prices as a result of Southwest’s arrival – and as I recall they’re lower or more convenient times than Southwest. Still I would like to thank Southwest by flying the airline sometime – should it prove cost-efficient and convenient.

Leave a comment

Filed under airfare, Arizona, Des Moines

Tagged as , , , ,

June 19, 2013 · 11:04 pm

Paying to reserve a seat on an international British Airways flight. Really???

So now I understand why my return flight from Prague to London on British Airways doesn’t include a seat assignment. Apparently I can only get a “free” seat assignment (for a very costly flight, I might add) 24 hours in advance. If I want one before that, I have to pay – and the fee isn’t listed up front.  (I finally found it after searching for too long.  It costs about $12, talk about nickle and dime-ing. For details see: http://www.britishairways.com/travel/paid-seating-terms/public/en_us-  OR http://www.britishairways.com/travel/ba6.jsp/paid-seatingprime/public/en_us

That is really irritating!! I booked this flight via American Airlines – which I’m flying outbound from Chicago to London and on the return leg from London to Chicago (after I sit in a lousy seat I was assigned “for free” 24 hours in advance) apparently.  American kindly granted me reserved seats – who knew this is now a perk???

Leave a comment

Filed under airfare, airline fees, Chicago, London

Tagged as ,

June 18, 2013 · 12:22 am

Pain in the neck paying my “unpaid toll” in Illinois

ISTHA Seal.JPG
Illinois Tollway logo.png

It took me about an hour to figure out how to pay my 60 cent “unpaid toll” on Interstate 284 online, in part because I couldn’t figure out which of the many interchanges was the specific one that I drove through without paying because I had two untenable choices – the exact change lanes or the i-pass lanes, neither of which I had. My advice in the future: if you do drive through without paying – try to figure out or make a mental note of where you are and the exchange number if possible (I don’t recall one being posted anywhere.) And you have to pay within 7 days or supposedly you are liable for a $20 fine. We had another situation like this on I-88 with unpaid tolls (this time because are only option was NOT to pay since the toll booths were unattended after 10 p.m. or so when we were passing through during our drive from Des Moines) and we got some sort of threatening warning that the third unpaid toll would not be a charm. And this was several years ago (we stopped going on I-88 after Illinois jacked up the tolls so markedly and now we go primarily on toll-free I-80…our tolls last week was because we took toll roads to Oak Park and to Evanston rather than taking toll-free I-55 into Chicago, as usual.)

Leave a comment

Filed under Illinois, interstates

Tagged as , , , , , ,

June 11, 2013 · 1:40 pm

Dangerous toll station on 294 in Chicago

What is it with Illinois and their highway toll areas? The state seems to have sacrificed safety, among other things, in its quest to, of course, save money. Yesterday as I entered the outskirts of Chicago at rush hour on Interstate 55, I took the exit onto 294 north and as I was barreling towards a bank of toll booths with a few dollars ready I found that there were no booths or toll takers, just a bunch of automatic toll areas, either exact change or I pass. I had neither and was not about to start fumbling around to find change with cars barreling behind me. So I drove through an I pass without paying. Why risk my life for 60 cents? or any amount actually? A few miles later, at another toll area, this one with a real live toll taker, I mentioned my previous experience and the toll taker said there is are rear end accidents all the time at the previous toll area due to the poor options.

Sadly it reminded me of stories I did at a Connecticut newspaper in the 1980s on highway safety after a number of bad crashes at toll areas on Interstate 95. And to think that I came to Chicago to write about a then-state-of-the art safely designed highway (the Edens expressway, as I recall.) Not too impressed now!

Leave a comment

Filed under Chicago, interstates

Tagged as , , , ,

May 16, 2013 · 9:23 pm

Lessons learning while buying train tickets for Eastern Europe

Deutsche Bahn AG
Db-schild.svg

Who would have thought it would be easier to buy train tickets online for  Peru than for Germany  and  Eastern Europe? Okay, I’m not willing to say that’s true yet. But buying tickets online for train trips this summer through Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic was harder than expected. I managed to find some of the train schedules on the DB Deutsche Bahn website (a German company http://www.bahn.com) but the site didn’t always list  the fares – or indicate when or if the tickets could be purchased online. (In some cases, it looked like I’d have to buy them by making a phone call to Europe.)

Rail Europe Logo

Meanwhile, on the site that I could buy at least some tickets online – Rail Europe (www.raileurope.com) – I couldn’t always find schedules or fares. I finally had to call Rail Europe and pay a $15 fee for phone assistance – which turned out to be worth it, even if I had to leave my name on an answering machine and wait for  an hour for Rail Europe to call me back (better than lingering on hold I guess.) Here are some things I learned through this process:

– If you can find a train schedule but NOT the price or when/if the tickets can be purchased via DB Bahn, email their help line (Sales@bahn.co.uk) and you will get some if not all the information. (This is helpful especially if you’re trying to see if it costs more to take the train or fly.)

– If you can’t figure out how to buy the tix online via Rail Europe, call and pay the additional fee ($33 all toll when you add the processing fee, which includes the cost of mailing the ticket – which are paper and not available for online printout.)  I was told that it would have been very hard  to do-it-myself online because the three train trips I needed to book are unusually complicated. They’re not the typical Yank tourist routes (Berlin-Gdansk anyone? Not to mention Gdansk-Krakow and Krakow-Prague). And they involve three different countries with varying ways of selling train tickets. (The Poles, for example, won’t let you buy your ticket more than a month in advance but I could buy the tickets involving Berlin and Prague about two months in advance.) I also found help by emailing service@raileurope.com.

– Figuring out the price and booking a sleeper for an overnight train is tricky because the countries we’re visiting – unlike some others, apparently – require that you buy two separate items for each journey (a ticket, which  gets you on the train, and a reservation, which specifies a seat or compartment on the train, – as I understand it.)

– A Eurail  pass, which   we’ve used in the past, didn’t work for this trip because of our particular schedule and because we’re taking two overnight trains. Oh well. I liked the ease of the Eurail pass – but then I was traveling for months, not weeks, when I used one on several occasions.

– Read the fine print – especially to see how many stops the train makes! There’s also various classes/speeds of train. I never really figured this all out.

– The Polish Rail website wasn’t much help.

– Rick Steves’ website also has some good information on train travel http://www.ricksteves.com/rail/

– Trains vs. Planes: Sometimes flying is comparable in price to riding the train (ex: Gdansk-Krakow) but not always (example Krakow-Prague where flying was much more expensive.)  Planes of course are a lot faster – for Gdansk-Krakow flying takes 1.5 to 2.5 hours (direct vs. connecting flight) while the direct overnight train takes  11 hours. But we went with the train 1) because we so seldom get to ride a train, especially an overnight train and still find this romantic (that may change.) 2) the times of the direct planes didn’t work well with our schedule  – one was 6:30 a.m. and the other 5:30 p.m.   3) It’s often a hassle to get to the airport vs. the train station. 4) we  do save money by taking an overnight train and not paying for a hotel that night, for what that’s worth.

– I did opt to fly (EasyJet) from London to Berlin rather than take trains. (way too complicated…)

– Paper tickets. Apparently I can’t print tickets out online. And the paper tickets won’t be mailed out until a few weeks before our departure date (even though I bought them two months in advance) because the Polish ticket can’t be issued until a month before we travel. Grrr… Here’s hoping it all works out.

2 Comments

Filed under Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, public transportation, train

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

April 30, 2013 · 11:09 pm

Sweat the details when contemplating flying RyanAir and EasyJet from London

Ryanair logo.svg
IATA
FR		 ICAO
RYR		 Callsign
RYANAIR
Founded 1985

So my trip to Poland (Gdansk, Krakow) and Prague this summer keeps growing – first I added Berlin. And then when I saw that I’d be flying home via London, I had to figure out a way to stop there too and see all my pals and the city where I used to live and will always love.

Then came a mad search to find those great cheap flights I’ve been hearing about from London to the continent – and I found several very reasonable flights from London to Berlin but the fares kept going up as I ruled out several airports to fly out of in London (no to Southend, which I’d never heard of – it’s in Essex – and which one English friend said would take as long to get to from central London as it takes to get from Des Moines to Heathrow; and no to Luton, which I did fly to Israel out of back in, um, 1982 and is also a schlep; yes to Gatwick and Stansted, which are reasonably easy to get to via public transport from central London) and as I ruled out very early flights (which would rule out getting to the airport via public transport.)

It looks like I’ll end up with a flight for about $98 – which isn’t the $40 I first thought it could be (although that hardly seemed possible) – but it’s not bad. That’s about what it costs these days to fly from Des Moines to Chicago one-way (thanks to Southwest Airway’s arrival in Des Moines.) I was tempted to take the train from London to Berlin but it stops in Paris where you have to switch trains and I don’t think I could bear to just pass through Paris.  So plane it is!

EasyJetlogo.SVG
IATA
U2		 ICAO
EZY		 Callsign
EASY
Founded 1995

Leave a comment

Filed under airfare, London

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 28, 2013 · 9:40 pm

flying American – between the merger and the sequester: who knows?

We are not flying American anytime soon (our next flight – to Phoenix on Saturday is on Delta) but between the pending merger with US Airways and the potential budget cuts if the sequester situation isn’t dealt with by Congress, it’s hard to know what to expect. A recent USA Today story about the effects of the merger (not the sequester) offered this info:

  • The merger will probably take months to finalize and to combine operations. So just keep buying American or US Airways tickets until you’re told to do otherwise. (Eventually there won’t be any US Airways. It will go the way of Northwest, Continental,  Republic, TWA…)
  • Your frequent flyer miles on either airline will be safe! It could take up to a year to consolidate the miles from both airlines into one American account.
  • One likely benefit of the merger is that the new American will increase the number of international flights offered.
  • One  likely downside: fares will likely rise on some routes although one study found that two recent mergers (United-Continental; Delta-Northwest) didn’t result in jacked up fares. Some say creating a third mega airline is better than having two mega airlines as far as fares go….
  • As for sequestration, if Washington doesn’t get its act together, there could be major delays in air travel starting in April at major hubs (chicago, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta) that will muck up travel for all of us.

Leave a comment

Filed under airfare, Airlines

Tagged as , , , ,

February 15, 2013 · 3:27 pm

Direct flights Des Moines-NYC coming back. Thank you Delta!!

File:Delta plane and Atlanta skyline.jpg

It’s been tried before – and it’s being tried again: Direct flights between Des Moines and New York City. This is excellent news for those of us who travel to New York frequently – now we just have to wait and see if the flights will be affordable. Delta will start offering daily nonstop service to LaGuardia on June 10.

The times are okay – flights will leave Des Moines at 7 a.m. (at least it’s not 6 a.m.) and landing at 10:45 a.m.; The return is a little less okay – flights leaving NYC at 8:59 p.m. and getting to Des Moines at 11:16 p.m.  This gives people another full day in NYC but sometimes evening flights are vulnerable to delays or cancellation, in my experience. And 11:16 p.m. DSM time is 12:16 a.m. NYC time – so that will be a long day. Oh well. It’s a start!

Leave a comment

Filed under airfare, Des Moines, New York City

Tagged as , ,

February 14, 2013 · 4:55 pm

Will the American U.S. Air Merger be good for us little folks?

I’m not sure what to make of the proposed American Airlines – U.S.Air merger – from what I gather it will further consolidate the airlines, leaving fewer options for travelers and the potential for higher prices. Then again, perhaps this is what both airlines needed in order to stay in business and I guess we consumers want that. Despite all the concerns about American of late, I’ve flown them recently and had no problems. (We’re flying American again next month from Des Moines to Phoenix.) I do have a bunch of free miles on American so will be looking to see if/how those are affected by the merger. And I do remember some initial operational glitches when United merged with Continental.

File:Aa.b777-200er.n781an.arp.jpg

Leave a comment

Filed under airfare, airline fees

Tagged as , ,