Volcano Mess

I've gotten a lot of e-mails asking me if the Iceland volcano has affected my travel plans. It's hasn't really, and that is mostly due to the fact that my flight goes from Detroit to Philadelphia then directly to Tel Aviv. I had the option of taking flights that were a couple hundred dollars cheaper than this one, but they flew through either London, Frankfort or Warsaw. I didn't anticipate most of Europe's major airports being closed down, but the travel time on a Detroit-Chicago-Warsaw-Tel Aviv flight was 36 hours including layovers, and my flights travel time was just under 18 hours. That was worth the extra money for me. Now that said, US Airways did add Tel Aviv to the list of cities directly affected by the chaos. Their policy is that if cancellations start happening, a customer could book another flight to another destination without having to pay the change fee (usually upwards of $250). All the customer has to do is pay the difference if the flight is more expensive. What this means for me is that if the volcano mess does start to make flying to Israel not possible (or unpredictable), I would have to find another destination, since this change without fee is only allowed if the departing flight is within 7 days of the original flight departure. My bosses were already counting on not paying my salary for the three weeks I'm going to be gone- so I have to take a trip.
So that would leave me finding an alternative destination, somewhere US Airways flies. My best guess would be New Zealand. I'd also consider Australia. I had also thought about Southeast Asia, but US Airways doesn't fly there. Alaska is another consideration, but the flight would be less expensive than my Israel one, Alaska is prohibitively expensive and May is probably still a little cold (and snowbound).
The biggest issue for me would be that all of my research for the Israel trip would be useless, as by the time I got to go in a couple of years, much of the hotel and restaurant information would have changed. It would leave me a really short time to prepare for the alternative destination. That's more of a problem because it would deny me the fun of planning the trip, not because I couldn't get the planning done in a short amount of time.
I hope to be able to go to Israel, and would say that barring another huge eruption, that's going to happen. I do want to visit New Zealand someday, and hopefully that day is a few years from now on my next big international foray.