Summer may be out like the New Orleans Saints' Heisman winner Reggie Bush, but in Santa Barbara, the season lasts all year long. That means you still have an excuse to be in the ocean, so pack your swimsuit and head to SB.

Jump in and see our top five picks for Santa Barbara's best water-based activities...

Another round of "Bags Fly Free" commercials are out from Southwest Airlines, and before they air during the upcoming football games, you can catch them online at SWA's Facebook page. The ads again point out the big difference between Southwest's baggage fees and those of most other airlines—that Southwest doesn't charge any cash for your first two bags, so long as it's under the approved size and weight.

The two-episode series follows two SWA baggage handlers, aka the "Bag Cops," as they chase down airplanes of other airlines, where the second and yes, sometimes ever the first checked bag, incurs fees. The ads are really cute and, more importantly, quite creative! We'd watch more of these mini-episodes, should they decide to continue the campaign.

Inside an OpenSkies cabin

Here's a bit of news you don't hear every day: OpenSkies, the British Airways-owned all-business class airline that flies between the US and France, is offering a money-back guarantee on their flights. To put it simply, if you don't enjoy the service the OpenSkies flight experience, then you can request a refund for your ticket price, which is usually at least $1500 round-trip.

The deal, announced today via the AP and Facebook, is called "Try OpenSkies, Love Everything or Pay Nothing." To take advantage of it, you've got to book and fly a round-trip with them from Newark or DC-Dulles to one of their three French destinations—Paris, Lyon, Nantes—by November 30, 2010. Then you've got to have a horrible flight, and who wants that to happen?

Following up on the weekend strikes in London and Paris, the phrase that the Associated Press is going with this mornning is "season of strikes in Europe." Put bluntly: there's not enough money to go around, and workers aren't going to go to their jobs unless they get more of it. It's not just Greece, although of course it's Greece too. Spain and the Czech Republic are hosed as well, and when you add them to the UK, France, and Italy you start to run out of countries that aren't going broke.

Now this is normally where we'd tell you that bad times overseas equal good travel opportunities from here. The problem is that you actually have to be able to get to those places, and a wave of airline strikes is about to start making that dicey. Virgin Atlantic just narrowly averted a strike, but they're pretty much the only ones. British Airways workers apparently have decided to walk out again, because that's who they are and that's what they do. Meanwhile roughly the entire country of India is facing labor-driven transportation disruptions.