Cheap airfare anxiety

Finding a cheap one-way ticket to Paris is always a crap shoot. So much depends on the time of year you're flying and how far in advance you book. Add to this the general stress of an overseas move, the tense wait for a work visa and an increasingly irrational terror of flying and you have a pretty good idea of how I was feeling when I went online to book my flight. I googled everything I could think of to bring up a legitimate and cheap booking service - "cheap airline tickets" "low price airline tickets" "dirt cheap flights" and I did find some promising looking sights that unfortunately advertised a fare that was no longer available (cheeky bastard monkeys!). In the end I decided to go with my old stand-by, Expedia. I've used them with the majority of my international and domestic flights and I've never had a problem getting a reasonable deal with well-known carriers. Plus I already have an account with them so I didn't have to go through the process of creating a user name, password etc. (Did I also mention that when it comes to booking flights I am incredibly lazy?) This time, however, I was confronted with a real dilemma - choosing between two airlines that I had never heard of before. My first choice was Aer Lingus, an Irish airline that stopped in Dublin on the way, and the other was Condor, a German charter airline that would take me to Frankfurt and then on to Paris. I started feeling panicked, who did I trust to fly me over the Atlantic, the Irish or the Germans. My friends were all in agreement, especially the Irish ones, fly with the Germans. My mom's advice was to pray about it and God would tell me what flight to take. I told her that I thought he would want me to take the cheaper one. And so that's what I did. Booked a flight on an airline that I had never heard of. For the next five weeks I woke up in a panic, imagining that my flight was going down. It didn't help matters that I had just watched The Secret and learned that I had the power to make manifest that which I imagined. Oy! I really have to stop imagining such negative things.

All told, I woke up the morning of my flight reassured that God would not be so cruel as to give me this job in Paris and then have me go down in a fireball somewhere off the coast of Greenland. And I made it. Not even a bit of turbulence. I even slept through the in flight movies thanks to a couple of Bloody Mary's and two Advil PM.