“How Dare You Try to Shore up Our Faltering Economies?”

The wife and I won’t be going to Europe any time soon.

As noted in many earlier posts, the Europeans do not like it when Africans try to visit. Admittedly, Africans have a bad history as tourists, because people from West Africa tend to stay in Europe hiding from the law until they die, but Europeans respond to the threat in pretty stupid ways. Instead of looking at each case individually, they accept applications, throw them in the trash as soon as the applicants leave their offices, wait a few days or weeks while only pretending to look at the applications, and then tell the applicants they were rejected for this or that unfounded reason.

How do I know this? Funny you should ask.

My wife has made several applications for visas for the Schengen Area, which covers most of the EU. Every application was rejected. This includes the visa the lying Italians assured her we would get if she paid for tickets in advance.

Every single time she applied, they took her fingerprints as part of the pretend-examination farce.

Schengen countries are required by law to hold onto all biometric information supplied by visa applicants for 59 months, regardless of whether the applications are accepted or rejected. As noted above, she was forced to supply fingerprints at least 5 times. This can’t happen if the applications are actually entered into the system, to which all Schengen countries are hooked up.

They didn’t enter her biometric information in their system, so it was definitely discarded, so they didn’t actually examine her applications. But they pretended to. Italy, Sweden, Germany, Czechia, Austria…they all lied.

If they lied to my wife, they lie to just about everyone. They make exceptions for celebrities, politicians, some scholars who are invited, and probably some very rich people. Everyone else presumably gets the fraudulent process, and all the countries collect fees for doing nothing and lying to people, most of whom are of modest means.

All of her rejected efforts were filed while she lived in Africa, before she had a green card, so we figured things would get easier once she got here. Turns out there are still problems. It may be that the Schengen countries are more likely to accept permanent residents. I don’t know. Even if a green card helps, these people do such a bad job of providing information, it’s still very hard to get an application filed.

We decided to try applying to Greece, which has an consulate less than a light year away, unlike the other European countries a person might actually want to visit (i.e. not Latvia, Estonia, Albania…). It was important to us to use a consulate that was not far off, because they seriously require people to show up for interviews. They haven’t heard of Zoom.

The Greeks have a website full of information which, if relied on by applicants, is sure to get their applications rejected. If you email them with questions, they tell you nothing. We did get a call from some nice lady who worked there, and that was wonderful, but it was a one-time thing, and it was not enough.

They require a bunch of things. Travel medical insurance in excess of $30,000. Flight and hotel information. The original passport. A passport photo. Proof of financial ability to cover the trip. Three bank statements. An itinerary.

Our application was in trouble from the time we left the house, because my wife failed to check and make sure she brought her passport. That’s on us. Her, I mean. I could not believe it. But we had no chance anyway, because they required things the website did not mention.

I did offer to bring the passport the following morning, which was a reasonable offer they should have taken.

They wanted proof of my income, in the form of W-2’s. I don’t have a job, thankyouJesusthankyouJesusthankyouJesus. Okay, they wanted proof I received Social Security. I’m not that old yet. Okay, they wanted my last three tax returns. This was not on their site. They just dropped it on us when we got there. Of course, I just pulled two returns out of one ear and the remaining one out of a top hat I had brought with me. Yeah.

I actually had to ask them whether they needed entire returns. They were not going to tell me. I didn’t want to bring in a stack of papers. Oh, no, they said. Just the first two pages. It’s beyond belief I had to ask.

They also said assets don’t matter. So if you put 10 billion dollars in your travel checking account, it doesn’t prove you can pay for a trip to Greece and back. But if you earn $2000 per month at Walmart, you’re clearly wealthy enough to travel.

They want bank statements, but they say they don’t help. What are they for?

I’m not going to tell the world what I have, but I can show a consulate I have way more in terms of liquid assets than anyone would need to finance three weeks in the second world. If I didn’t, I could not be paying for foreign trips.

Does not matter.

Incidentally, this means you can’t go to Europe during a given year until you file your taxes. If you file an extension, you can’t get a visa until the return is filed. If you think you’re going to go to Europe, make sure you file before you apply, or get an appointment before April 15.

The amazing thing about all this is that you can put whatever you want on a tax return and give it to the consulate. You can take Turbotax and create a bogus return in an hour. Creating fake bank and brokerage statements is way harder.

I doubt you can get in trouble here in the US for falsifying an application for a foreign visa. The US doesn’t care about other countries’ immigration laws, and I don’t think the elements of criminal fraud would be satisfied due to the lack of monetary damages. Also, tax returns are confidential, so foreigners should be unable to verify their contents. I should claim to be a famous rapper and submit returns saying I made half a billion every year.

Floyd Mayweather supposedly took a $27 million check from a fight and put it in his checking account. Supposedly, he does not invest, so he has no regular income. If he were a green card holder from Kenya, he could never go to Europe. But if he were a green card holder from Kenya with $5000 in his checking account and a job managing a Papa John’s, he would have a shot.

Regarding our air travel plans, they said I could not just show up with something I had written, to prove we had flights. That was confusing, because I had supplied them with printouts from Orbitz, proving we had paid in advance for flights to and from Europe. These tickets cost something like a grand more than nonrefundable tickets, but I knew what I was up against when I bought them, so I spent the extra money.

Before the process started, they warned us not to actually buy tickets in advance. They said they just needed reservations. That mystified me, because reservations are things that have not existed for maybe 40 years. You either buy a ticket, or you have nothing.

In the past, other Schengeners have accepted “dummy tickets,” which are worthless tickets fabricated by travel agents. I thought actual tickets would be better than dummy tickets, which are clearly fraudulent by their very nature.

I paid for our hotels and rental units in advance, too. I thought that would impress them. Paid for, not just reserved.

I could not understand the consulate lady’s objections, so I kept questioning her in hopes of doing things right the next time. Finally, she gave me an explanation I understood, and which could possibly be correct, although I’ll bet it’s not.

She said the problem was with our INTERNAL flights. I had not booked flights between countries in Europe, thinking that PAID hotel bills would make it pretty clear we would be in various places at certain times. She said they needed to see the flights in order to show how long we would be in each country.

When she said I had just written down whatever I wanted, she was referring to the itinerary I drafted. Her objection made no sense at all. Our paid flights were documented by Orbitz receipts, and in the itinerary, I made no claims at all. I said we hadn’t chosen flights yet, assuming it was obvious we did not intend to walk across Europe in a couple of hours.

You can see how crazy the concern about internal flights is. If I have a hotel room booked in Greece on the morning of the 23rd, and I have another hotel room booked in Germany on the night of the 23rd, obviously, I will be in Greece in the morning and Germany in the evening, because I don’t want to lose hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Obvious, obvious, obvious. Whether I choose to use a train, a plane, a hot air balloon, or a camel to make the move doesn’t matter.

Well, it mattered to her.

A hotel booking is much stronger than a plane ticket. I can buy a ticket from Athens to Zurich any time I want. They’re abundant. I can cancel. I can rebook. No problem. Hotels don’t work like that. The supply of good hotels dries up fast, so once you get one you like, you do whatever you can to hold onto your booking. You are married to it. But try and tell the Europeans–the professionals who evaluate visa applications for a living–that.

I bought us medical insurance from American Express. I thought this company’s reputation was unimpeachable. The consulate told us it was no good because it did not expressly say “valid throughout the Schengen Area” on the documentation I gave them.

That blew my mind. How many visas has Greece processed? Millions. And they want tourist money, because their economy can’t survive without it. They should know a lot by now. We are not the first people who have used American Express. It should be very, very obvious that if American Express provides TRAVEL insurance to an AMERICAN and his PERMANENT RESIDENT wife, it covers them while they TRAVEL. Where do most Americans go when they travel overseas? EUROPE. They should know this by now.

I get it; they’re not Americans. But they live and work here, they know what American Express is, and as experienced consulate workers, they ought to know what American Express travel insurance is. If not, they should let you use your phone to print out additional information at the consulate instead of sending you home to try again in 6 months, by which time you will have given up or gone somewhere much nicer than Greece.

If I had bought bogus insurance through a fringe company like Heymondo, it would have cost much less, the documents would have assured that it covered us everywhere in Europe, and if we had ever presented a claim, it would have been denied, because Heymondo doesn’t pay claims. But Greece would have taken it. Other countries have. Worthless insurance costing $11 would have worked, but $41 insurance from the most respected travel company in the history of the universe was presumed ineffective.

I should not have to struggle to get a visa for my wife. We are well off. We have clean records. She has a green card. We live on a wonderful property in a wonderful county, so we don’t want to live in a depressing apartment in Athens or Rome. We have been to 6 foreign countries, and we returned home on time in every case. We did our best to follow the rules, and I’m a lawyer. If I can’t get it right, what chance do most people have?

We brought information they didn’t ask for on the website. I thought I was displaying exemplary caution. Our international driving permits. My passport. My driver’s license. My wife’s Zambian ID card and driver’s license. Our Global Entry cards.

When they saw my wife’s superfluous stuff, they told us they didn’t want it. They seemed to think we brought it because we were stupid or didn’t understand English, but we were just trying to be prepared. Then they started asking me for things they didn’t ask for in advance!

The people at the consulate really tried to be helpful, as far as I could tell. But their website is horrible, and they didn’t explain things well in person, either. I’m still not positive we could get to Greece, or even get an application accepted, this year if we decided to try again.

I have canceled all our tickets and reservations. Greece can kiss thousands and thousands of my dollars goodbye, during a relatively slow time when they could use the money. I wanted to give it to them. I wanted to see Greece again. I looked forward to the people. I remember the Greeks as very pleasant, with the exception of one creepy guy who used a braless girl in a tight dress to try to get me to go to his bar.

Tough self-made luck for Greece. I can’t go through this again for a second-tier destination. They will probably find other reasons to reject us, because they can’t get it together well enough to help us give them what they want.

If I’m going to suffer like this and risk losing months of travel opportunities every time, I’m going to shoot for the best destination there is: Switzerland. Forget Greece, which is good, but not great. Forget all the other nice-but-not-that-nice Schengens. Forget Sweden. Forget Belgium. Forget Poland and Hungary. Forget England, which I have never wanted to visit anyway. I don’t have time to waste. We’ll drive six hours to Atlanta, where the nearest consulate is, we’ll stay in a hotel, and we’ll file a visa application there. Then we’ll visit Tennessee, because my wife wants to see it.

I really like the Greeks, but let’s face it: the Swiss are on another level. If there is a way to do things right, the Swiss will do it. They make Germans look like Mexicans.

Ouch. That was harsh of me.

They won’t tell us to buy tickets and then turn out to be lying, like the Italians. They won’t give us incomplete and incomprehensible information, like the Greeks. Their explanations will be easily comprehended by two intelligent people with 4 college degrees, including two law degrees.

They’ll probably even file my wife’s application instead of throwing it out immediately.

I told my wife I would never have to divorce her. If I get tired of her, all I have to do is drive to the airport and fly to Europe, Japan, Israel, or just about anywhere else people actually want to go, without a visa. There is no way she’ll be able to follow me, ever. I’ll be able to take the kids. They’ll be Americans.

Applying for visas for Africans is like asking strangers if you can mail them your poop.

Maybe we can make it in the fall, by which time the wife could be pregnant and the size of a house. Great for hiking in the alps.

Oh, well. There’s always Yellowstone Park.

In case anyone else wants to try getting a Greek visa, let me point out a hazard. People on the web say they give you an approval or disapproval at the appointment. Not true, at least for my wife (African…hmm). They told us they needed two weeks.

We knew it could take 15 days for the visa to arrive, but we thought we would know the answer right away. Not even close to true. If we had scheduled the trip later, just when the hordes of drunken, spoiled, rude Chinese and American tourists will start to pour in, we would have had a chance, but these days, you don’t go to Europe in the summer unless you have no choice. Europe is overrun in the summer.

If I could stand crowds, we’d live within two hundred yards of our neighbors.

When you deal with a Schengen country, you have to have lots of stuff booked in advance. Here is something consulates do not understand: hotels give you a certain amount of time to cancel each booking and get a refund, and unless you plan a trip a very (unrealistically) long time in advance, the time to cancel will pass not long after your visa appointment.

If you have a problem at the appointment, you may not get your visa before you have to pay for your bookings or cancel them. If you cancel them, the Schengeners will reject your application because you canceled. They’ll find out, because they pull weasel tricks like that. If you don’t cancel, you’re betting thousands of dollars on getting a positive outcome from known flakes, which no one but an imbecile would do.

They don’t care if you lose a million dollars. Means nothing to them. They will cancel you without warning, and they will not help you make it right in time to fix the problem.

The Greeks said they could put us on a waitlist for a canceled appointment, and there was some chance we could still make it. No way. We had cut it close already. It was nice of them to make the effort.

If I were to try to plan the same trip again, it would have to be for this fall. It would take me a week of staring at the computer. I would have to spend maybe $10,000 on bookings. I’d get an appointment in June or early July. Then they would say no by early- or mid-July, and I’d have to start over, meaning we couldn’t go to Europe until the following May, unless we wanted to freeze under skies the color of mud. I’d have to go through the miserable process of making sure all my money was refunded, and the hotels and airline would take their sweet time.

It just doesn’t work. Not for a place like Athens. I can risk it for Lucerne, though.

If you do what I’m doing, you get two chances per year. You can try to travel in late spring, or you can try to go in the fall. After you blow those chances, you are done. If you want to go in spring, realistically, you should ask for your appointment in November, and you will get an appointment in February. If you want to go in the fall, ask no later than May, and they will see you some time in July.

The Schengeners make things too hard.

Maybe it’s time to try Japan and Taiwan. Those are good possibilities. There is literally nowhere I want to go in this hemisphere, outside of the US. I don’t want to be bombarded with even more Spanish, see cultural and historical sights of near-zero merit, eat second-rate amoeba-laden food from peasant cuisines, drink water that gives me diarrhea and rectal bleeding, and have poor Indians try to sell me crude, tasteless blankets I wouldn’t use to cover vomit stains on the backseat of a ’74 Pinto.

My wife and I were a car ride away from Chichen Itza, and neither of us were willing to go. Not only was I unwilling to pay to go; I would have paid at least a hundred dollars for each of us to be excused from going.

If it were across the street, sure, but wasting a whole day to sweat in the jungle and see where savages cut children’s hearts out? No, thanks. I’ll see it on Youtube, or, more likely, I won’t. It ain’t Versailles, kids. Nothing beats Europe, and that includes what we have here in the US.

I think I’ll look into Taiwan and Japan tomorrow. Can’t hurt.

Spend Big, Pack Big

My wife and I are not planning to travel right away, but I am still obsessed with planning a trip that could materialize later this year. Today’s gut-wrenching decision: carry-on or checked bag?

When we went to Mexico, expecting to stay two days, we took a big checked bag and one small backpack. The low-budget airline we took charged about the same amount for checked bags and carry-ons, and we figured they could manage not to lose our luggage on a nonstop flight, so this is the strategy we chose. It worked.

Other than that, we have always taken at least one big bag each, one backpack for electronics and valuables, and maybe some other small bags. It has worked well for us most of the time.

The only times we had problems, we were part of the chains of failure.

On a trip back from somewhere or other, I failed to collect my checked bag at JFK and take it through customs. I thought it was checked all the way through. The airline brought it to me a day or two later. No big deal.

On a trip back from the mediocre destination known as Ireland, Air France and Aer Lingus stole my wife’s checked bag. They and Heymondo, our crooked insurer, refused to pay. The bag turned up months later, missing several hundred dollars’ worth of possessions, which we had to replace at our own expense. The bag itself was ruined, because, you know, it’s impossible to store a sturdy hard-sided bag on a shelf for several months without ripping it apart. Bags I leave in my closets fly apart all the time.

We checked the bag at a kiosk in Dublin. She had an Aer Lingus flight to France, an Air France flight to Johannesburg, and an Airlink flight to Lusaka. The kiosk printed us a bag tag for Paris. As a result, the airlines took the bag to Paris and left it there.

Not running airlines personally, we didn’t know the airline had made an error. We had this idea that they had huge global computer networks that routed bags to their correct destinations based on passenger names, originating flights, confirmation numbers, and common sense. We didn’t know the final destination had to appear on the tag.

The airlines do this so often, there is a name for it: “short-tagging.”

The airlines screwed up, but if we had been more seasoned and more adept at catching their disgraceful, inexcusable mistakes, we would have gotten the tag fixed in Dublin.

The part where they and the insurer all lied to us for months was not our fault at all and not foreseeable. That’s on them.

Having had these experiences, we have been considering learning to cram all our stuff into carry-ons. Carry-on bags are positively chic now. If you check a big bag, people make fun of you, as though you’re some kind of rube because you don’t want to wear the same pants 8 days in a row.

Pro-carry-on arguments sounded so smart to me, I ordered a really nice carry-on, and it arrived today. I think I’m going to send it back without opening it. This very week, I wrote a piece listing my reasons for wanting a smaller bag. Since then, some things have occurred to me. I’m not saying I was WRONG about anything, because that could never happen. Merely that I may not have been totally 100% correct.

I told MY truth.

1. The rate of truly lost bags is somewhere below 1 in 200. The vast majority of “lost” bags are merely delayed a day or two.

2. You don’t actually have to fill a checked bag with things you can’t stand to lose, and you can put clean underwear and socks in your pockets when you fly, enabling you to survive until your bag arrives.

3. If you take a big bag, you have a place to put things you buy while traveling. If you take a carry-on, you’re going to sit on it and put it in a hydraulic press and do whatever else you have to do to get as much junk as possible into it before you leave. You will not be able to jam souvenirs into it.

4. If you check a big bag, you never have the common problem of suffering with small luggage and also having to check your tiny bag at the last minute because the airline didn’t plan.

5. With a big bag, you can go a week or more without doing laundry. Laundry is expensive, and doing laundry in a bathtub is no fun. People who use small bags often wear things over and over, which is gross.

6. People complain about the time it takes to collect a checked bag. This is silly. If losing 30 minutes is that big a deal, your vacation is too short, and you will lose your mind when you get to customs and immigration, not to mention the lines at places like the Vatican and the Acropolis. Disney World will make you wish for death.

7. Travel is about memories, and if there are no pictures or videos, it never happened. Good camera gear is a lot better than your Iphone. If you have a checked bag, you have more options for carrying things like extra lenses and remote mike sets. These things take up room, and you won’t want to check them. The more junk goes in your checked bag, the more camera gear can go in your backpack or an extra carry-on. If you don’t have a remote mike set, and there is any wind at all when you shoot, and the camera is over a foot away from whoever you’re shooting, no one will be able to hear anything you or your companions say, and you may say very important things. “WHUMP WHUFF WHUMP WHUFF WHUFF love you WHUMP WHUFF WHUMP live without you WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP marry me and make me the happiest WHUFF WHUFF WHUFFITY WHUMP.” Is that what you want to hear 50 years later?

8. I saw a guy complain about moving around with big bags. I have traveled with a huge rollaboard and a backpack that weighed around 20 pounds. No problem. You only have to move your own luggage when you’re between vehicles. Cars have trunks. Buses and trains have racks. Moving your own bags is good for you, and it will help you gain less weight on your trips. Lifting an inadequate 25-pound bag is not much easier than lifting a 35-pound bag that fills all your needs.

9. If you have a big bag, you can dress more appropriately. You can bring two pairs of shoes. You can bring real pants and a jacket. You won’t find yourself at a Michelin-starred restaurant in cargo shorts.

The main problem with a checked bag is that a disgusting pervert who is also a high official in the Biden administration may steal it so he can wear your clothes, but this only happens if you’re female or think you’re female. There haven’t been any cases of confused XX Biden appointees stealing gender-correct clothing from actual men.

I’m starting to think that carry-ons are for short trips to third-rate destinations like Cancun and Miami. You land on Friday night, drunk. You lie on the beach drunk until Sunday afternoon. You fly home drunk Sunday night, thinking about RU-486 and/or penicillin. If you’re flying home from Miami, maybe you’re concerned about a fresh bullet wound. For a situation like that, a carry-on is perfect. For multi-week trips to nice places, a big bag seems to make more sense.

I think I should return this thing. This is what I get for listening to millennials who wear mildew-smelling knee-length basketball shorts everywhere they go.

Feast, my Darlings

Are Italians really as Italian as people think they are?

My wife and I went to Mexico, a place known for emotionalism, tardiness, poverty, dishonesty, and laziness. Our hotel was not perfect, but it was pretty clean, the staff was helpful and efficient, and the security was good. Now we are looking at Florence and Rome. I wasn’t able to find a single hotel that didn’t have scary reviews, so we are shooting for Airbnb instead.

Italians suffer from the same basic stereotypes as Mexicans, except that you are less likely to be kidnapped by the police in Italy. Are the stereotypes justified?

I have traveled a lot over the last three years, and I rely on reviews, for whatever they’re worth. One thing I know is this: if a business has 3,000 reviews and a near-perfect rating, you ignore the good reviews and read the bad ones. Read the ones that start with phrases like, “I can’t understand all the good reviews.” This is what I did while looking for Italian hotels.

I looked at hotels under a certain price. Repeatedly, I saw complaints about bad smells, nonfunctional air conditioning, noise, rude staff, violent staff, dirty rooms, bedbugs, bait and switch games, and elevators that didn’t exist or only went part of the way to rooms. I figured I was being too cheap. I looked for rooms that cost more. Same hotels with the same reviews. I could not find anything that looked acceptable, and I was willing to pay $400 per night.

Here’s the worst thing I saw: hotel proprietors routinely insulted and argued with guests who left bad reviews. Some apologized and said they would try to do better, but many, many reacted like, well, like Italians.

If you’re going to insult and belittle your customers and accuse them of lying on the Internet, where the world can see it, what will you do in private when new guests arrive?

When you look at bad reviews for Swiss hotels, you see a different picture. The clerk didn’t want to provide extra towels. The room was small. The hotel was too far from the train station. No one complains about stained sheets, reservations canceled without notice, or sewage smells.

We went to Egypt and picked a hotel and a cruise ship off the web. The hotel was clean and spacious. The bathrooms were fantastic. They had bidets. The food was pretty good. The staff was nice. There was no noise. The ship was clean. The staff was wonderful. The food was better than the hotel food.

We went to Turkey. The hotel could not have been much better. Everything was spotless. The beds were huge and comfortable. The bathrooms were worthy of the nation that invented the Turkish bath.

Egypt and Turkey. These are not blue ribbon destinations. Egypt is a second world country, and if Turkey is first world, it’s not high on the list. Italy is held out to be a real country, like Germany. How come they can’t run decent hotels?

I considered giving up on Italy, but…it’s Italy. You can’t take the Ponte Vecchio and the Coliseum and move them to a nation where the hotels are clean. Italy was the hub of Renaissance art. The art is still there. If you want to see it, you have to risk sleeping with the bedbugs.

If we go, we will use Airbnb. We’ve had good experiences with apartments in the past. You get to sit at a dinner table. You get to do laundry. You get a real refrigerator. You don’t get drunks screaming right outside your door all night or banging on it by mistake, trying to get inside for sex.

The general, but not ironclad, rule about stereotypes is that they don’t develop in a vacuum. No one complains about the Japanese being overemotional or dishonest. No one crosses the street upon seeing a big male Norwegian approach. The people complaining about Italian hotels surely have good reason for their critiques. Italians are fun people, and they live in a fun country, but if Egypt and Mexico are beating them, they need to shape up.

I did some research and learned that Rome has some excellent pizza shops, so I hope to hit at least one of them if we go.

In a few weeks, we will know if we have a visa.

Visa Attempt Number 42

Having survived Cancun, the wife and I are now making another effort to get to Europe. Like Charlie Brown, running up to kick that elusive pigskin, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment yet again.

A Greek consulate is not far off, so before long, we will be heading there so my wife can be put under a microscope and possibly allowed into Europe.

The Europeans we dealt with in past efforts refused to give us a chance. They thought a woman who had traveled to several countries with her relatively affluent husband, and who had returned from said countries without setting off any bombs or overstaying her visa and becoming a petty criminal, was sure to remain behind and start a human trafficking ring or something. Now we have a green card to bolster our wild claim that my wife wants to return to the US and her big house after our next trip. We hope it will get us some traction.

The Greeks at the embassy seem very nice. They actually called me and talked to me. That was a first. With other countries, I had a better chance of getting a return call from J.D. Salinger, and he’s dead.

We constantly get better at applying and traveling.

The Greeks want us to show them an airline reservation before they will give us a visa. There is no such thing as an airline reservation. I don’t know exactly when airlines stopped taking reservations, but it was probably in the eighties. When we were trying to get my wife visas in Zambia, we got travel agencies to produce ridiculous fake itineraries, which the embassies knew were fake. Somehow, this worked with several countries.

I finally figured out how you deal with the reservation requirement. You buy refundable tickets, which are insanely expensive. You go through the embassy process. If you get a visa, you return your tickets and buy new nonrefundable tickets which are much cheaper.

It’s all a big scam. It seems unfair to the airlines. On the other hand, airlines behave really badly all the time, so it’s hard to feel much sympathy. Air France and Aer Lingus literally stole my wife’s luggage, returned it months later, destroyed, and missing hundreds of dollars’ worth of stuff, and refused to pay us a dime. Airlines steal and break things all day, every day. Since 2001, their waiters and waitresses have gotten really full of themselves. They love throwing people off planes now.

We spent $3700 on tickets we have no intention of using. If we get a visa, we’ll only use our tickets if we can’t get cheaper ones. If we don’t get a visa, we’ll take all of our money back.

I don’t understand how having tickets makes you a better visa candidate. Osama bin Laden could have bought airline tickets legally. I can understand how they would want you to have a return ticket before flying, but that’s completely different. They could approve you before you buy the ticket and then require you to produce it at the gate before your inbound flight.

It would be nice to see Greece again. It’s one of the world’s top travel destinations. It’s not like Cancun, our last destination, where American kids go to practice regurgitation. We have booked a tour of the Acropolis and one for Corinth. We’re also planning to do a food tour.

You can keep the islands, except for Crete.

We’re shooting for Switzerland for the second part of the trip. Aim high when you expect to be rejected, I always say. I want to see Lucerne again. We want to visit the tops of some alps and take boat rides on the lake. We also want to see the Interlaken area. We hope to stay in Wengen, which is what God created while he was working on ideas for heaven.

Switzerland is the most beautiful country. Yeah, yeah, it’s subjective, yada yada yada, whatever. Switzerland is the most beautiful country. It’s more beautiful than any mountainous area anywhere else. North America, South America, the Himalayas…no competition.

There are other places that look good in photos. Go there, get out of the plane, and what do you get? Mosquitoes. Blistering heat. Stifling humidity. Europe is the air conditioned continent. In Western Europe, even the bad days are great by American standards.

The alps have natural beauty plus a population that appreciates it and creates houses and buildings that complement it. Other mountainous areas look like slums in comparison.

Georgia has one of the two highest mountains in Europe. The nearest town looks like mud daubers built it.

Of course, not all of the beauty of the alps is in Switzerland, and Norway has some stunning scenery, but overall, Switzerland IS the most beautiful country. So we are going to try to go there and stuff ourselves with dishes full of potatoes and fried cheese.

The Swiss also have it more together than anyone else. I would put Singapore in second place. The Swiss are rich, they have very little crime, and they seem to do everything they do as well as it can be done. I suppose most of them are godless leftists, but they are extremely capable godless leftists.

If they won’t take us, I guess we’ll have to vacation in Tennessee.

I’m trying to improve my touristing skills. I have always traveled with a huge old bag because I had to bring my wife things. On the way over, the bag would weigh 45 pounds, and on the way back, it would weigh 20. I always had to go through the bag claim. I never knew whether the airlines were going to steal my things. Now I’m trying to work it out so I can take a carry-on.

You would think it would be simple, but it isn’t. Different airlines have different carry-on size requirements. It’s really stupid. I’m trying to find the biggest carry-on around that will make nearly every airline happy. So far, it’s looking like the Travelpro Platinum Elite Rollaboard.

A rollaboard is a bag with two wheels. A spinner is a bag with four wheels. I don’t know why they call them spinners. Maybe because you can spin them on their wheels. It’s a stupid name.

Rollaboards are better than spinners. They’re sturdier. Spinner wheels tend to snap off. Rollaboards also hold more stuff, because the rolling hardware takes up less room.

Some Youtube travel nerd recommends a backpack with no wheels. Sorry; no. My backpack is my personal item. Also, if I have a second backpack on my back, how will I carry the first one? You want one bag on your back and another one on wheels.

When we travel, I take a PC and some camera stuff. That means I have to carry my backpack everywhere. I can’t leave expensive stuff in a $40 hotel room safe, and I can’t travel without a computer and camera.

The alternative is to keep using my giant bag, continue to avoid putting valuable things in it, and hope the airline and TSA employees don’t steal too much.

If I do that, I risk finding myself in a foreign country with no clean clothes. That actually happened to me when I was a kid. My mother had to take me to stores in Luxembourg and buy me tight clothes for European kids with little stick arms and legs.

I am practicing filling my wife’s carry-on with my stuff. If we can work it out so we still have a fair amount of junk with us when we travel, maybe I’ll get a smaller bag for myself.

I want to go to Europe this year because this may be the last time we get to travel without a baby or a heavily-pregnant woman. It amazes me that people manage to travel with babies. I can’t see us doing it in another country. Maybe in the US. It sounds unbelievably difficult and expensive, and no baby is going to benefit from foreign travel. He or she would just make things worse for us. I don’t think travel does anything for kids until they’re at least 8.

Make that 10.

It’s hard enough, slowing down for my wife. We take forever to leave our hotel rooms in the morning. She can’t walk up hills like I can. She has to sit down a lot. Imagine adding two tiny wives that aren’t potty-trained, can’t walk, and can’t read.

I see how being orphans is going to impact our future. If we had parents or even useful brothers or sisters, we could leave kids with them.

Both of us should have Global Entry by the time we try to travel, so there’s that. On the way home from Mexico, I had to wait in the long line with my wife and the suspicious peasants.

It’s all up to the Greeks. Either we’re going to Greece, or it’s, “Hello, Gatlinburg.”