Congrats, Peggy! Now that your air is settled you can breathe a sigh of relief. As Denise mentioned, she emailed me after you posted, and I'm envious of you. I've been checking and rechecking air recently, and I find the $699 fares, but when taxes are added they come to roughly $870. When the FLL-DFW flight is added, it's about the same as RSSC air, which includes transfers. So I haven't actually booked anything yet. Because of the Heathrow-Gatwick problem you mentioned, my preferred itinerary would be the Dallas-Zurich non-stop, followed by Zurich to Nice on Swiss Air. But you can't even get this itinerary online at aa.come (Swiss Air isn't a partner), although on the phone with AA it was the same price as on Travelocity -- again around $870 like the 2-stop itineraries the AA website gives us. Sigh. What to do?????

A question for you seasoned travelers: Since we probably will have to buy a round-trip ticket and toss the return, is there any best date to schedule the return (other than the cheapest)? I'm thinking maybe schedule it for the day after we return home, in case the airline calls. Would that ever happen? I don't want our house/petsitter or our emergency contacts to get a call and get all worried, if we were still traveling on the date we didn't show up for our scheduled flight.