This month has been absolutely insane. I've been on the road more than I've been home, and I've hardly had any time off. Yikes! Given that I haven't been a good blogger lately, I thought I'd share a few things I've picked up this month about airlines.

The travel began on Oct. 3, when I flew down to LA to attend the Community Summit before MAX. Most folks who know me likely know that I run an Adobe User Group and that I'm an Adobe Community Expert. I get a lot of folks asking why I invest a lot of time and money into those two things when I'm not getting paid, and I can sum it up in one word: community. Through the User Group and Community Expert programs, I've had the opportunity to meet and become friends with an amazing group of people around the nation.

A few years ago, Adobe began a tradition of holding a Community Summit, where all of the User Group Managers and Community Experts could get together, learn new things, and more important (at least to me) socialize and network. This year, the decision was made to hold the Summit on the day before MAX. While I was quite disappointed when I found out that I would not get to attend MAX itself (especially when I learned that missing MAX meant missing Mark Hamill), I decided early on that I would fly down to LA for the Summit.

As I almost always do when I fly to LA, I took Southwest. While I may joke that they are "Greyhound with wings", they really do what they do well. I'm discovering that they manage to provide more in their "no-frills" approach to travel than many of their competitors do with the "frills". So I am and will likely remain a big fan of Southwest.

The reason I couldn't attend MAX was that I had accepted a teaching assignment in Fort Lauderdale, beginning Monday morning - the day after the Summit. So I made arrangements to fly from LA to Fort Lauderdale. I had heard people raving about AirTran, and since they met my two main requirements, cheap and at the time I needed, I decided to go with them. And I regretted it.

First off: I'm glad that some airlines are waking up that it's the 21st century and installing WiFi on their planes. But you know what? On a 4 or 5 hour flight, WiFi doesn't do me a lick of good without power. To me, offering WiFi on a flight without installing power jacks at the seats is like eating pizza without being able to drink Coke. I'm supposed to be excited that I can pay to surf the Internet and drain my battery even faster? Really?

And second: you want to know something that Southwest does right? Comfort. Maybe it's a Boeing thing: Southwest's fleet is made up entirely of 737s, while my AirTran flight was an Airbus A320. But whatever the reason, the seat wasn't comfortable at all. And I was in First Class to boot!

To be fair, they did have one thing I liked - satellite radio at the seat. It's nice to have a ton of channels, instead of the 5 or 6 that "real" airlines offer.

When the time came to return home, I thought I had booked a flight on United to come home. But it turns out that I didn't, thanks to "code-share", which is airline speak for "screw customers over." Because you see, there is one airline that I already know I hate, so much so that when I search for fares, I immediately ignore theirs: US Airways. So imagine my surprise when I go to check in and discover that the flight I had booked via United.com, the flight I had paid United for, was in fact a US Airways flight. Screw you, United.

(And on a side note: when I tried to check in on United.com, I got a message that said, "Your flight is being handled by another carrier, and you need to check in on their site." That was it. Notice what's missing there? Really, United? It's that damn hard to tell me which airline I need to check in on? Maybe even provide a link? So again, screw you, United.)

The flight home was fine, even if I was flying on the World's Worst Airline, and even if I was still feeling slighted by having been screwed over by the winner of the World's Worst Customer Service Award, 50 years and counting... The upside was that I flew through Philadelphia, which to the best of my knowledge I had never been to before.

I got home from my LA-Ft. Lauderdale trip on Thursday. I spent Friday with the kids, and then Kelley and I got up at stupid o'clock to drive to San Francisco and catch our flight to Seattle. Why SF, you ask? Well, because we had been talking about a trip for a long time, and then found out that Virgin America had $49 each way fares to Seattle. So that settled it. The only catch is that we had to fly out of SFO.

Virgin America is, of course, the domestic off-shoot of Virgin Atlantic. They only fly to a few cities here in the US, all of them along one of the coasts. So I bet that I lot of people haven't flown them. But if you get the chance, do it. They rock. They really make flying an "experience" again.

What's so cool? Well, for starters, the plane itself. The interior lights are pink and purple. Seriously. Boarding a VA flight is like boarding some sort of space ship. Second, in SFO, they had a special boarding process: of course they started with First Class and handicapped folks, but then, rather than boarding back-to-front, they said that anyone who was travelling light - anyone whose only carry-on was a backpack or purse or something similar that could fit under the seat - could board. Then, they had the people with the rollers. So that was cool. (Well, I thought it was cool because we got to board early, but still...)

Every seat has one of those little TV screens, and you can watch live satellite TV, listen to a wide variety of music, and even play games. All for free. (They do have pay-per-view movies as well.) You can also watch a map of your flight. And it's all controlled from a remote in the armrest that actually comes out, so you don't have to contort yourself around to use it.

They offer WiFi, which I assume you have to pay for. But guess what? They also have power. Real, normal power jacks, as well as USB jacks. At every seat. Kel and I were able to spend the entire flight watching movies on her laptop, without having to worry about the battery.

I actually think that Virgin America rocks so much that, once they begin service to Ft. Lauderdale next month, I'm going to seriously consider taking the extra time to get to SF just so I can fly with them. I know that that seems silly, but time on a flight or train tends to be my most productive time. While I appreciate and use the 2 hours I can get on battery, being able to write for the entirety of a 5 hour cross-country flight would be awesome.

After our return from Seattle (we also went up to Olympic National Park, Victoria and Vancouver, and loved it), I got to be home for a whopping 3 days. Then began my Two Weeks From Hell (which isn't even over yet...)

My hellish schedule was entirely my fault. Let me explain. I had agreed to do a class in Ft. Lauderdale on the Wednesday - Friday of that week; shortly thereafter, agreed to the class I'm currently teaching in SF the following week (today through Wednesday). A bit later, I heard from both of those training centers that the classes had low attendance and would be unlikely to run. So when I was offered a class on the Monday and Tuesday of last week, and the Thursday of this week, I took them, assuming that those would be the only three days I would work in that two-week span.

In addition, I had applied for and been accepted as a speaker at BFlex and BFusion, a conference sponsored by the University of Indiana and hosted at their campus in Bloomington, IN. The conference was Saturday and Sunday. Things were looking OK: I would teach Monday and Tuesday, fly to Indianapolis on Friday, do the conference, come home Monday, and teach Thursday. Not a bad two weeks.

But then, within the span of about two days, I heard from both of those other training centers. Despite the low enrollments (2 students each, as it turned out), both centers had decided to run the classes. So now, I would be teaching in Sacramento on Monday and Tuesday. Somehow I would have to get from Sacramento to Ft. Lauderdale Tuesday night to teach starting Wednesday morning. Then Friday, I would fly to Indianapolis and drive to Bloomington (about an hour south), only to drive back to Indy Sunday night to fly to San Francisco and teach Monday - Wednesday. I'd then come home Wednesday night, and teach in Sac again Thursday. In essence, 11 straight days of work, in 4 cities on opposite sides of the country. Sound exhausting? Yeah.

The most efficient way to fly from Sacramento - Ft. Lauderdale - Indianapolis - San Francisco, I discovered, was to book a series of one-way tickets. And thus began my little Odyssey: six flights in as many days, on three different airlines.

I began by getting from Sacramento to Ft. Lauderdale Tuesday night. This time, I picked another airline I had heard nice things about: JetBlue. Unfortunately, all you need to do is go reread that paragraphs above about AirTran, and replace references to AirTran with JetBlue. The only difference? JetBlue didn't have the satellite radio, but they do have satellite TV in the seat back in front of you.

I flew from Sacramento to Long Beach, the world's strangest airport. No jet bridges - you board the planes via ramps - and the airport isn't even a single building. I actually had to walk outside to get from one set of gates to the next, and all of those gates are housed in what really look like temporary buildings.

At about 9:30 at night, my flight left for Ft. Lauderdale, due to arrive at 5:30 AM. Yup - I'd be flying all night. If you haven't done that before, let me assure you that it is exactly has horrible as it sounds.

My Ft. Lauderdale to Indiapolis flight was on Delta, so that of course meant that I had to change planes in Atlanta. I seriously wonder if it's even legal to fly Delta without a stop in Atlanta. This was a nice enough flight - it was a 757, and they let me choose an exit row seat when I checked in, and didn't charge me for it. (I assume that that was a mistake, and that whomever was responsible for missing this chance to milk customers out of more money has been fired.) Once I arrived in Atlanta, I headed to my gate, thinking I had 2 hours to kill, but then I noticed that there was another flight leaving for Indy in only 20 minutes. Figuring there wasn't any harm in asking, I went to that gate, and got right on board the flight. That ended up meaning that I was checking into my hotel in Bloomington at about the time I had originally been scheduled to arrive in Indy.

My homeward bound flight was on United. Yeah, I know - why do I do that to myself? Well, in this case there wasn't a choice. It turns out that for some stupid reason, you can get a late-evening flight (due to the time the conference ended and the time needed to drive to Indy, I wasn't able to get a flight that left before 8pm) from Indianapolis to Sacramento on a Sunday night, but you can't fly to San Francisco. However, you have to be willing to fly United to do it. I know, it doesn't make sense, but in this case, I didn't have a choice.

There was a bright spot: when I bought the seats, I was given the opportunity to upgrade to First Class for only $50, and knowing how tired I'd be by then, I took it. When I went to check in this time, I was of course surprised that I wasn't being told to go to some other airline. Just as you must always go through Atlanta if you're on Delta, flying from anywhere to anywhere in the East on United means a stop in Chicago. Out flight was fast, and actually arrived about 20 minutes early, which was awesome since I knew that I only had 20 minutes scheduled between my flights, but of course it's against corporate policy at United to do anything nice for customers, so they made us sit on the tarmac. Not for 20 minutes, mind you, but 30. I sprinted off the plane, only to discover that I would need to wait 10 minutes to catch the shuttle to the other concourse. Chicago, it seems, figures that even if the airport is insanely busy (as it was that night), they only need a single 14 passenger van to serve as the shuttle between concourses. Ugh. But in the end, I made my flight, all went well, and I got home.

I got home, that is, at 12:15 AM, only to drop immediately into bed since I needed to wake up at 4 to make my train to SF, since the stupid airlines couldn't get me directly to San Francisco. Grrr...

So anyway, here's my breakdown. I've done a total of 13 legs of flights this month, on 7 different airlines. According to WebFlyer.com's mileage calculator, I flew for 13,375 miles. (The really bad thing about flying all those different airlines is that those miles are scattered across 7 different frequent flyer programs.)

My rankings of the airlines:

1. Virgin America. They freaking rock. Five stars out of five.
2. Southwest. They do what they do well. Three and a half stars out of five.
3. Delta. For a "traditional" airline, they still seem to get you where you need to go, so long as you need to go through Atlanta. They do nickel-and-dime for most things, but again, I like the exit-row-without-a-charge thing. Three stars out of five.
4. JetBlue and AirTran. These two are all but indistinguishable. They're trying to market themselves as discount carriers like Southwest, but then they also want to be taken seriously. The resulting schizophrenia doesn't work. Two stars out of five.
5. United. Proof that companies can survive, and by all appearances thrive, purely on momentum. Have you seen United Breaks Guitars? Pretty much sums it up. (Here's the story behind it.) It would be nice, by the way, if United employed even a single web designer who actually knew what he or she was doing. Oh, and I forgot to mention something above: in First Class, they have the life preservers between the seats, which results in a great big box under the seats. This means that there isn't actually the normal amount of room under the seats for your carry-on. That's right: you pay extra for less room. Nice. One star out of five.
6. US Airways. There's really nothing at all I can say about them that's even vaguely polite. So I won't. Zero stars out of five.

In closing, let me just say that I can't wait until I get home from work on Thursday and can relax, at long last.