I’m working from home this afternoon. I answered two whole emails. Apparently nobody else is at work either, so they don’t realize they need me for anything. That’s cool.

I shoveled the driveway and sidewalk. I volunteered to do that instead of going running this afternoon. Shoveling is an excellent workout. I might be sore tomorrow, though, which is ok because then it will be Denny’s turn to shovel. To his credit, he did shovel before work this morning, but this snow doesn’t look like it’s going to stop.

I hearby retract my love for the travel discounter lowestravel.com. Remember how psyched I was about them before? Well…after Denny tried for four days, I finally got ahold of Max, who apparently is the brains of the operation. As it turns out, the tickets we thought we’d bought are unavailable. As Max explained, someone was trying to book the tickets at the same time we were, and the other people won.

He offered several solutions, one of which had about a zillion stops (Cedar Rapids > Detroit > Boston > London > Munich > Lisbon), the other of which was nowhere near the dates we needed, the other of which was pretty expensive. According to this Max character, even though Northwest and KLM are partners, if your ticket says KLM, you have to pay “German tax” when you fly into Germany. If your ticket says Northwest, you don’t. And even though two of the options were the exact same flight, apparently all the Northwest tickets were gone, so all that was left were those with the “German tax.”

Ahem. German tax. I bet this is especially insulting for Northwest’s Jewish clientele.

So I hung up with Max without making a purchase (Denny talked me out of it; I was all set to make an impulse buy), and we did some research on our own. Orbitz showed great prices, but then as soon as we tried to buy them, they were mysteriously unavailable. Maybe Max wasn’t completely full of it. Who knows?

Anyway, what we finally ended up doing is buying directly from Northwest. We had to shift our dates a little, but we’ll still be there for the whole conference. The price was more than the mythical ones that no one seems to get, but it’s on the low end of the different prices we found through various carriers and permutations of dates. Also, the connections aren’t bad at all, just Cedar Rapids > Minneapolis > Amsterdam > Lisbon. Plus I prefer to buy through the actual airline when I can. I know I’ll get my frequent flyer miles, I have more recourse if I need to cancel or make a change, they don’t have any of that fake price b.s.; it all just seems less fly-by-night (har har).