I was reading Carla’s blog from earlier this week about choices and it took me back to a subject I’ve been dwelling on lately – all the choices of connections that are presented when ‘you can’t get there from here’ (nonstop). I’ve been trying to plan a route from Tampa to Warsaw, and there are so many choices that I empathize entirely with Carla’s British friend who stressed out over burger toppings. Certain parameters make choices easy. You can order your burger with nothing on it; you can take a nonstop. In my case, I have to build my own ‘burger’ because there are no nonstops. I usually try to look for the lowest number of hours in transit at the lowest price. Sounds simple, right? Not so much. The one-stop connections–fly to a U.S. gateway and then take a nonstop to Warsaw–seem to be the priciest. It doesn’t help that the day I need to fly is the one day of the week that LOT, the Polish flag carrier, doesn’t fly out of either Chicago or New York. So like Carla’s friend, I’ve been bogged down in choices. My preference is to leave in the evening so as not to lose a day of work at home, and most of the connecting flights seem to go midday. On the return flight, the best connections leave early in the morning, losing me a day there. Once I start using timing as a criterion, the options widen. Do I want to overnight in Paris? Fly home via Minneapolis? I’m serious–one of the best connections to get home is on Northwest via Minneapolis. In this day of high fuel costs, it just seems awfully wasteful to go to Minnesota in order to go to Florida. Then I start thinking, well, if the route is going to be convoluted anyway, let me see where I could top up one of my mileage programs. So of course those turn out to be the least workable connections. You get to the point where you think, oh heck, let’s throw some more money at it and simplify life. It’s as if Carla’s friend decided to just go to a steakhouse and order a slab of rare meat. Unfortunately I realize that living near TPA is like being stuck in a burger joint – plenty of choices, but no premium options. – Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer