DarrenKitchen.net

I’m going to be living with a girl!

I just bought my 15th and final round trip ticket to Springfield Missouri. Ok so I’ve got one more trip to Springfield after this in May but that’s a one-way ticket. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not moving to Missouri. I couldn’t possibly leave my friends in Virginia and the HakHouse. I’m heading out there in May for Shannon’s graduation then we’re driving 1,000 miles back home!

Yeah! How freaky is that? I’m going to be living with a girl!

Anyway I’m excited for obvious reasons. I can’t wait until I can see Shannon whenever and not have to buy a flight. Those things really add up ya know! I wish I had learned about priceline.com earlier into this whole adventure. Did I mention this adventure has crossed the 9 months mark now? Yeah, way cool eh?

Ok but about priceline, they’re really cheap if you know what you’re doing and have a little wiggle room with your departure times. What I mean is you can use their name your own price service to get a really good deal and you can choose your departing and destination airports but you don’t get to choose what airline you’ll fly and when you leave. So far I’ve been lucky and have always been hooked up with United.

For the longest time I was paying full price at Expedia.com which is fine if you’re looking for a specific flight. I was booking with them for American Airlines flights until I had a really bad experience where our aircraft had a failure shortly after takeoff and we had to head back to the airport. That’s the short version of the story. The longer version involves dropping from typical cruising altitude to 1,000 feet and circling around a lake with the wings and gear down and the throttle up trying to burn fuel until we were eventually on the ground escorted by fire engines back to the gate and nobody at American was there to greet us and I had to nag a ticket agent half to death until I got the last flight to St. Louis that day thanks to my eee PC, some googling and a little social engineering. Toss in some praying and dramatic pauses and you’ve got the gist of the long version.

So anyway about Priceline.com, they’re really cheap like I said. They advertise something like “save up to 40%” but you can do a whole lot better if you’re adventurous. I’ve typically saved around 83%, especially when booking less than a week in advance. It turns out they fly the damn planes whether they’re full or not so why not make a buck on that last seat while ya can right?

If you really wanna save some dough and you’ve got multiple credit cards, public IP addresses, and a little skill futzing with session cookies you can really get a good deal. Sorry, no details.

So all and all I’m totally stoked about my last trips to Springfield, Missouri. I’m going to miss going out there every few weeks. It has been a lot of fun chilling at the 1984 Arcade, getting some frozen custard at Andy’s, fragging it up at Fanat.exe LAN Cafe or rocking out at MSU. Though one thing for sure is the next chapter will be just as exciting.