After a week spent flying in coach from Austin to Washington Dulles to Chicago and back, I am in full-on rant mode about the horrid state of air travel in the U.S.

Never have I felt like such an underappreciated sack of potatoes; an abused commodity and not a customer. Although I’m normally a glass-half-full sort of gal, it’s time to shift into “hostile mode” about air travel.

Nothing personal here; I know several pilots and flight attendants and they’re great people, but for the foreseeable future, I recommend that anyone who travels by air must always assume that the worst is going to happen on your trip, and plan accordingly.

Ready? Dukes up.

** Airline attack plan — overbook flights to ensure that every seat is full, then bump the excess people (that’s you, sucker.)

• Your riposte: check in as early as possible, preferably always online 24 hours prior, print your own boarding pass and get to the gate early. Stragglers lose.

** Airline attack plan — cramp your style by squooshing maximum human flesh into teensy seats with minimal seat pitch (legroom.)

• Your riposte: Don’t be obese or tall (control whatever aspect of this that you can.) Check with SeatGuru for the least-abysmal legroom options on your aircraft. When you can, always pick your seat ahead of time online and make it an aisle seat, for your own mobility and comfort.

** Airline attack plan — save money by not providing food or drink unless you pay for it.

• Your riposte: Never travel without at least an energy bar with you; assume you’re in the Sahara or some other place bereft of food. Carry an empty water bottle through security, then fill it at the water fountain. Never assume that anyone will feed you, so bring your own sandwich from home, or a box lunch from your hotel, or pick up something at the airport. Don’t let ‘em starve you or leave you thirsty and dehydrated.

** Airline attack plan — make checking luggage miserable by charging you for bags, then losing them.

• Your riposte: Never let ‘em get their paws on your stuff. Never check your luggage unless you want to go to Alabama or some mystery place at Heathrow to claim it. Get over that pack mule syndrome and travel light (2 pairs trousers, 3 shirts, 2 pair shoes & do laundry during your trip) then put all that in a carryon with wheels. Be sure that you can lift your bag into an overhead bin yourself and don’t expect any help. Women, figure out how to carry only a laptop bag and be sure you can fit your purse into it, because you are only allowed one personal bag and even though sometimes that’s ignored, don’t give them an opening to force you to check anything.

Your ultimate attack move in return to all this is to refuse to fly unless you absolutely, positively have to, or at least adopt a personal no-fly list for the most egregious airlines.

Factor in some additional time and try the train or the bus (yes, the bus and these guys have free WiFi aboard.) It couldn’t be much worse than the cattle car airlines, and you’ll sure have more seat room.

Make it a pleasant road trip and drive yourself, perhaps carpooling with office mates for business travel.

If you do have to fly, pop those B-complex vitamins for your nerves, and gird yourself for battle. I’ve got your back.

The EU, in a move characterized by staggeringly short-sighted stupidity, has approved the use of mobile phones on planes in EU airspace. Interestingly, while the story has been reported in the US news under the travel or news sections, the report from the BBC was relegated to the technology section. If I had a newspaper, I’d run it under the “people who run our world are complete monkeys” section, this being an example of what must be late-night decision making by drunken monkeys.

When I wrote about the prospect of phones on planes earlier this year, I was worried but didn’t really believe it would happen in a sane country any time soon. My criticisms were real, but tongue was firmly planted in cheek.

Now I’m just pissed. The EU is encouraging airlines to set limits on 1) number of calls, 2) duration of calls, 3) timing of calls (as in no calls at night), and encouraging providers to set limits on 4) price. Nobody has mentioned anything about setting a limit on 5) the number of people irritated passengers can strangle. Goody. Do they really think that terrorism and safety are the only issues, and the annoyance factor only an afterthought?

I know some people out there don’t think this is such a big deal, but let me ask you this: in your frantic race to establish all sorts of rights for yourself to stay in meaningless contact with people who can surely wait a few hours, did you ever stop to consider others’ rights to peace and quiet?

I’m sick of decisions like this. I’m a lover of vast, quiet places, serene nature, old trees, massive mountains, silent lakes. I spend travel time searching for these increasingly rare spots. There is almost nowhere in the world I can go anymore to find them. Always, the rights of people to drive ATVs and snowmobiles through quiet woods, to gun pointless speeding motorboats through lakes previously unpolluted by petrol or noise, to blare music along stretches of gentle beaches, and to chatter inanely and loudly on mobile phones while in transit, always, these supposed rights take precedence over the right to quiet. It’s a world run by extroverts who can’t shut up and can’t stand a moment of silence.

Contemplating a trip to Europe next month, I was holding back because my baby is teething and I was concerned about the effect his relentless crying would have on my fellow prisoners in a tin can. But now I’ll take him gleefully. Anyone who thinks that I can’t complain about their right to make one more unnecessary business call or who forces me to listen to their previous night’s sex exploits deserves to have my son screaming in their ear for six hours.

That is, until I board a Lufthansa flight. That airline has, thankfully, decided to sit mobiles out and will be simply providing fast Internet access instead. For you, Lufthansa, I will soothe my son to sleep. What goes around comes around. Shush.

Proving that my blog posts are like busses - you wait for ages and then three come along at once, it was reported in the UK’s Daily Mail over the weekend that British Olympic Athletes have had a clause added into their contracts forbidding any political dissent at the Beijing Olympics.

Mindful of not wanting to insult the Chinese government, athletes have been forced to sign an amended contract stating that they will not publicly comment on China’s Human Rights record, or their shameful invasion of Tibet. The Daily Mail has likened this instruction to the one given to the England football team to give the Nazi salute when playing at an international in Berlin in 1938, and used this picture, previously unpublished in the UK, as an illustration.

Bearing in mind that the Dalai Lama has called for peaceful protests at the Beijing Olympics, over the issue of Tibet, then it seems that the British Olympic Association is siding WITH the Chinese Authorities AGAINST the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet.

Interestingly the British Prince Charles has indicated that he will not attend or support the games, although his niece, Zara Phillips (Granddaughter to the Queen) will be forced to sign the contract if she does attend the Olympics. That could be an interesting debate over the family dinner table!

Most travellers know that possession of cannabis has been decriminalised in Amsterdam, and that you can consume small amounts in coffee shops with impunity, yet most people wouldn’t be so dumb as to try to take some home.

Fewer people might know that the mildly addictive herb Khat (or Qat) that is widely consumed in North Africa and Arabia is also legal in the United Kingdom, yet many people have been arrested taking it from there, to other countries in Europe.

Yet did you know that if you take a common painkiller that contains codeine (which can be bought over the counter all over the world) or certain cold and flu remedies, and then fly through the United Arab Emirates even days later, you can be locked up for a mandatory four years for possession of a banned substance?

The BBC News website is reporting a number of worrying cases where people have fallen foul of the stringent UAE drug laws, which are backed up with very sensitive detection equipment.

Substances - even miniscule amounts - can be found on your person, or even through blood or urine samples! A British man is facing four years in prison for having 0.003g of cannabis stuck the the sole of his shoe - an amount weighing less than a grain of sugar, and invisible to the human eye! Even more bizarrely, a Swiss National is currently serving four years in prison, after three poppy seeds from a bread roll which he ate at Heathrow airport were found on his clothes!

The organisation, Fair Trials Abroad, has a list of pharmaceuticals and medicines which are banned in the UAE. Even if you study this list, and stick to it for weeks before your departure, I would have to say, why bother? With recent studies finding that 99.9% of UK banknotes and 94% of Euro banknotes carry traces of cocaine, then the only safe advice for travellers must be to avoid ALL travel to the UAE, or even changing planes in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, lest you might end up with the mother of all plane delays - four years in the slammer! You have been warned!

It seems that cold places really are getting more space in our travel, and, unfortunately, pointless tourism. In the new Jan/Feb 08 issue of Perceptive Travel, Marie Javins has one of the most excellent essays I’ve ever read about the disappointment encountered when trying to experience the soul-thrilling empty ice of Antarctica. When a fellow passenger prods her to count how many countries she’s been to (”C’mon. Everybody knows. Don’t pretend you haven’t counted” has got to be the best distillation of the much-argued difference between tourists and travelers I’ve ever read) she realizes that the once-in-a-lifetime encounter she’d been hoping for is lost among the 37,500 tourists who ticked Antarctica off their lists that year.

Antarctica is a place I, too, have dreamed of going to. But after reading Javins’s essay, I’m more inclined to wait and follow some of her recommendations on how not to see the ice as one of thousands of tourists.

In addition to stories on a desert survival school in Utah and traveling up the river in Borneo, this issue also has David Lee Drotar traveling across Arctic Finland not by plane train, and automobile, but by snowmobile, snowshoe, dogsled, icebreaker ship, and reindeer sleigh.

And Fawzia Rasheed de Francisco has a very funny essay of particular interest to me as a new parent: is it really that hard to travel with kids? What are the drawbacks? What are the phantom fears? And what happens to all those happy life-in-my-rucksack twenty-somethings when they have kids? It can’t be that scary or difficult. After all, she points out, children do live in most parts of the world. Which made me ready to start thinking about my son’s first trip once he’s well enough to fly.

And kudos to Perceptive Travel magazine, which published Amy Rosen’s article “How to Build an Igloo (at 40 Below),” which won a First Prize from the North American Travel Journalists Association.