should i be seeing signs?

as much as i would like to treat each blog entry to a nice picture of something, i just can't do it because it's such a huge production right now. i felt the need to justify that, and now i feel better.

a couple of weeks ago when a spanair flight crashed, i got goosebumps. alex and i are flying from malaga to barcelona on spanair (and earning aeroplan miles while doing it!) so that's slightly concerning. thennn, my second sign came yesterday when alex called me at 12:57pm - hey, zoom (airline) is "days away from ceasing operation"!

we booked our flights to paris on zoom because american express had just signed a merchant deal with them so employees got an additional 15% off. well then. hopefully the airline will remain in business until our trip is over. at 2:38pm alex called again - yeah, they're closed. nobody answers the phone there anymore. there's a statement on the website. looks pretty darn ceased already!!

so i'm thinking, freaking hell, should i just stay home for the week? then i think, but i have all these flights and hotels booked in europe! then i check the prices on airfrance.ca, ba.com, aircanada.com, and i think, holy crap flights are SO expensive! then i call amex (GREAT company btw, not biased) and they said they'd pay me back for the zoom tickets in 6-8 weeks so i think that's ok then, at least i'm getting money back. after a lot of debating, we just bit the bullet and bought tickets encore - full price. my biggest lesson learned in the past year is that all problems, big or small, go away when you throw money at them. indeed we threw our hard-earned cash at aircanada.com and now we're back on track to be in paris on september 6th!

seriously, though - two incidents hinting that perhaps i shouldn't take this vacay. what next? if there's a third sign from now until september 5th, i'm going to be realllllly concerned.