Friday, June 30, 2006
A planning we will
go, a planning we will go…
Today was a busy day. My mother and stepfather (with some prodding from me, I must admit) have decided to go on vacation. We began planning a week or so ago to fly down to Arizona to visit my grandparents, whom I hadn’t seen in over fifteen years. I planned an itinerary and looked up the cost of flights, hotel and rental car. I even discovered that the dates I had picked out had a flight available whereby I could use my accrued frequent flyer miles from Northwest Airlines to fly down for free…what a deal, I thought. I looked up my grandparent’s number online and persuaded my mother to call them and see if they would be there on the days that we had chosen to travel. My grandmother responded that she would look at her calendar and let us know soon. Well, the days began to pass and still no word from my grandmother, so we gave up the Arizona trip idea and instead focused our attention on planning a trip to South Dakota, our other choice of destination. I had researched places to see, hotels, and even approximately how much money in gas it would take to drive there and back. Then today my mom got a call from grandma, who let it be known that they would be available and were looking forward to our visit. Well there went all my South Dakota planning out the window. Now I had to re-look every thing up to see if the flights, hotel and rental car were still available or not. It turns out that luckily they were. However, with my ever-present bad luck, I discovered that there was no longer a flight available for me to use my frequent flier miles on. I had accrued just over 26,000 miles, but now the “price” of a ticket had risen to 35,000 miles. So, now I had no choice but to purchase a flight with actual money. Damn. I quickly booked everything online, as we would be traveling less than a week from today, on July 6 through July 10. In the end, it looked like I had actually pulled off something of a miracle, which was surprising, as nothing ever seems to go right with me…hopefully the trip will go off without a hitch.