Since retiring, we've lived in the desert and on the West Coast, and fly at least once a month, mostly domestic, and almost exclusively on Southwest Airlines. We've been happy flyers with SW for nearly 20 years and have rarely had a complaint of any kind. It is a bare-bones outfit, so we don't expect luxury, but we do expect to get where we're going on time. SW has done that for us about 95 percent of the time. But, for the best price, always shop around.

We recently had to fly from San Diego to San Francisco, and to our surprise, discovered that the Virgin America price was far lower than the best we could get from SW. The basic Virgin ticket price was $77 each way per person. The best for the same we could get from SW was $167. With taxes and all the other add ons, we could fly round trip on Virgin for less than $200 each, while the SW fare was almost double.

It wasn’t a Royal Caribbean, Princess, Holland American, Disney nor Norwegian cruise. Uncle Sam paid for my first ocean voyage. When, in wartime 1943, my local draft board was dragging as many 18-year-olds as they could grab into the Army, I decided sea air was much healthier than foxhole mud. I enlisted in the Navy.

Fortunately for my ego and reputation among my shipmates, I wasn't seasick as we sailed through the choppy waters of San Francisco Bay and headed out to the Pacific. However, it seemed every one of the 2,800 young Marines aboard were. As one of the lowest-ranking members of the crew, my first Navy job was to help clean up the grossly messy passenger bunking areas, chow (cafeteria) compartments and heads (toilets).