Alaska Airlines from Edmonton to Rhode Island T. F. Green International Airport

Picture the scene, dear traveler. The brisk air of Edmonton’s winter simultaneously chills and excites you as you anticipate your journey to the land famously divisional by its mention of "green" and "airport" in the same breath - Rhode Island T. F. Green International Airport. As you mull over possible routes, your eyes catch an ad from the “Alaska Airlines.” The airline with images of snow-capped mountains on their tail, connoting the Alaska’s paradoxical fact: it’s both the most northern and western state, and oddly also the easternmost, teasing the international date line. It's truly an airline that seems to sponsor the worst kind of geographical confusion.

Scrolling through, you’re enticed by an array of flight options, from round-trip to one-way. At once, you imagine that it's a clever ploy by the airline to keep you in the loop - an attempt to conflate your temporal understanding of a return trip with a merry-go-round. Or perhaps, the term 'one-way' subtly alludes to the airline's secretly assertive nature - ‘Our way or the runway.’ Such jargon is of course engineered to abstract your primary aim of hurtling through the air in a metal tube, subjected to an insulated world of shrink-wrapped food and recycled air.

They even offer, for those who particularly enjoy giving their internal clock the middle finger, the glorious ‘Red-eye flight’. A seductive departure into the world of the nocturnal, accompanied by the uncompromised joy of disembarking, bleary-eyed and disoriented in a location where the sun has already been awake for hours. More often than not, you'll need copious amounts of highly caffeinated beverages to merely twitch your eye open. Oh, the joy of jet-setting!

However, not all is doom under the dome. If you're one of those 'half-glass-full' people, you'll view the journey as a potential upgrade (pun intended) from economy class to business class. Why, you may ask. Well, with business class, not only can you combat leg cramps with more room, you can also lay flat, pretending to yourself that the layer of leather underneath is a plush king-size mattress at a five-star hotel room.

As you pay for the flight, the fare, humorously labelled as 'Airfare', often comes second only to your mortgage, despite the temporary nature of the service that offers you nothing more tangible than the experience of defying gravity for a few hours.

As a frequent flyer, should you choose to join their mileage program – you could be swung rewards in exchange for customer loyalty. A practice that's much akin to collecting stamps in a book during your childhood, except this time around the rewards can range from an extra baggage allowance to First-class upgrades or access to the illustrious 'VIP' lounges that offer you complimentary peanuts and lukewarm wine.

But of course, like every good story, there's the fine print, also known as the flight cancellation policy. A policy made in a language so convoluted, it'd shame medieval scholars with its contexts and codifiers. Quite essentially, it's their way of saying - ‘a penalty applies if you decide the chill on Rhode Island is better experienced on another day’.

Therefore, curious traveler, the next time you’re seeking cheap flights or desperate for last-minute flights to satiate your wanderlust, spare a thought for Alaska Airlines. The airline that makes it possible for you to experience, in a matter of hours, the wonderful roller-coaster ride of thrilling take-offs, turbulence-inducing weather, recycled air, airplane food, airport anxiety, and, the ultimate – an arrival into an entirely new timezone. Bon Voyage!