Phone hell

I spent hours on the phone this afternoon, changing the dates of an upcoming trip--a vacation this time--out to Jenner, CA. If you don't know where Jenner is I'm not gonna tell you--nyah nyah--I don't want it to become spoiled by massive numbers of tourists (heh, as if I had massive numbers of readers--oh well, I can dream). I can claim to be, technically, not a tourist there, since we own a piece of "unimproved" land a few miles north of there, a place where we used to go camping when we lived in northern Cal.

The proof of the lack of spoilage is in the fact that I was able to get the (100+ year old, supposedly haunted) cottage I wanted, at the Inn I wanted to stay in, booking only a month in advance. Alas I was only able to get that particular cottage for 6 nights; we'll have to move to another room for the last 4, but it will also be nice, with a sleeping loft for Mike.

Then I had to change the plane tickets--UGH. I always book tickets through Travelocity--they offer pretty low fares. But woe to the hapless traveler who wants to change a reservation made through Travelocity: any change requires a call to customer service (obviously outsourced to India), and two long, long waits on hold. That's not the worst of it: they charge a hefty fee to change tickets, and the new fares are invariably so much higher that it would be cheaper to tear up the original tickets and book a new trip from scratch.

After waiting on hold so long that I dug my cell phone charger out of my suitcase and plugged it in for fear the phone would die, I got the bad news that it would cost me $666 to change the tickets (*gasp* what evil is this!) I was so disgusted--the tickets had only cost $586 to begin with--that I told the guy I was going to try calling the airline directly and hung up in a snit. Hurray--I made the right call. I got the new tickets, almost all the flights I wanted, and ended up paying only $240 more. Sweet.