My son Daniel and I are heading out to Oregon to spend a few days on the beach and fishing with Flybinder.

Before he tells everyone about our misadvantures of the first day, allow me to set the stage.

This morning, Daniel and I were packing the car at about 9:00am for our 11:20 flight.

As we were grabbing the itenary with all the necessary stuff, like directions to Paul's neck of the woods from PDX airport and the confirmation for our flights, my bright young son, Daniel (aka. Young Brad Pitt because of an episode of impressing the girls while fly fishing in the Smokey Mountains last summer) asked me a very serious question.

Dad, what is this 8:55am thing on the ticket mean?

Well, son, I replied like any good dad, that was 3 minutes ago and it is when our plane was supposed to take off.

For those of you all who are math majors, 8:55 is not 11:20. In fact, it's not even close to 11:20. Worse yet, as my math may not be the best, I believe 8:55am is earlier than 11:20am.

The airlines seemed to agree with my assessment of the situation and the young lady in India or somewhere that isn't here gleefully informed me that we had indeed missed our flight.

Being this was not THEIR fault, she also gleefully informed me the next flight out today was overbooked.

We had 2 choices, we could go to the airport, check our bags and hope to get on an already overbooked flight.

The other option was to take a flight out tomorrow. OK, being somewhat weak in my math skills, I thought there were already more people trying to get on the plane than they had seats so having my lugggage swing around on some turnstile in Oregon for over 24 hours seemed to be a bad idea.

The young lady in India or somewhere that isn't here was very kind but I'm sure she had somewhat of a twinkle in her eye as she informed me how much the "fees" were going to be to change my flights. In fact, she was nearly giddy as I did the math (this time I had to use my toes and fingers to count that high) I quickly realized the new ticket and related penalties err, I mean fees added up to over 2x the initial ticket price.

Given the choice of coughing up the cash or disappointing Paul (and young Brad) I decided discretion was the better part of valor. I reluctantly read off those numbers on the front of my Visa card and we'll be boarding a flight at 9:45am tomorrow.

I did what I should have done in the first place and printed the itenerary out and promptly handed it to my loving wife so that she could also confirm the time.

One must also remember that I have a wife and this fihing trip just got a whole lot more expensive.

My biggest concern now is what is she going to buy to make up for her part of the difference. Yes, she does see this as my stupid mistake and I'm sure some new trinket will be awaiting me upon return from Oregon and that new trinket will most likely be somewhere around the "extra" cost of the trip.

I just had to tell the story before Paul did or before he told Ohiotuber or Joe and left the storytelling up to them. That would have been bad.



Jeff