San Diego Comic-Con; transportation

So, I registered as a professional and made my hotel reservations for the Comicon back in March. And I haven’t worried too much about it since then, except to be sure my professional registration was accepted and that I’d be able to afford the hotel room. Except that there’s this one other really important thing… See, I have to be able to get to San Diego. Me and my brother both.

Now, my brother theoretically ‘has’ a car, but since he is not licensed nor insured, my father uses it full time, and needs full time access to it to deliver newspapers from every night. It’s how he pays the bills. And he basically pays ALL the bills. So unless he’d repaired the third car in the family by now, the chances of Heath and I just driving off on our own were small.

My sister, Angela, has expressed interest in going with us. She has been in and out of work recently, and said that if she had a job & could get off or if she had no job, but could afford incidentals, she would drive us to San Diego and hang out on the beach or whatever during the days (she hasn’t much interest in the actual convention…). But sometimes she feels like going and sometimes she doesn’t, so I’ve not been counting on her, saying only that “if she’s in a good mood that day, Angela might drive us”.

I have another friend who has expressed interest in driving us to San Diego, and who has the time off work, but they’re not sure they can get a place to stay in San Diego, and may have other responsibilities, plus I’ve not had much luck getting hold of them for a few days. Of course, I’ve been pretty busy/involved myself, but … Whatever. There’s still two weeks until the con.

So then today Angela applied for a job she thinks she’ll get, but if she does, she’ll be in training during the week of the con, and could not attend. So tonight my brother and I went over to priceline to see if we could maybe, theoretically, afford plane tickets. Since Angela and I just drove to Vegas and back, and San Diego isn’t too much further than Vegas (plus we’ll likely do a lot less driving in and around SD than Vegas), we have an idea about how much gas it would take to get there and back.. probably $30-$40. But I know I’m already cutting it pretty close with my cashflow, and Heath has almost no cashflow, so I’m looking at some pretty cheap plane tickets to fit out budget. So I sidle over to priceline.com and punch in my travel dates and my home and destination and that I need two tickets, and I say hey, how about $30 a ticket? That’s ridiculously low, whaddya say?

Well, before it got to the verifying my order part, it informed me that on plane tickets from here to there, there are just over $28 in taxes per ticket. Which doubles the cost of the tickets. So, I dropped my offer down to $15/ticket, and the full price for two $15 tickets is $98.30. Which seems sortof odd to me. I cut what I wanted to pay ($30/ticket) in half, and the total comes out to more, instead ($49.15/ticket). Of course, no airline is going to sell me roundtrip airfare for $15 apiece. So it was refused. I played around with their options, extra transfers, red-eye flights, non-jet planes, up to $16/ticket ($100.30 total, the maximum I could theoretically afford and more than twice the cost of gas), and they just wouldn’t take my offer. Oh well. What was the point? $30 in taxes/fees per ticket seems excessive. It means I can afford $30 less travel. It doesn’t encourge me to travel by air, it discourages me. Charging a $10 9/11 tax doesn’t help the airlines recover from 9/11, trust me. I know, I know, my price is way, way too low. But I’m paying about 40% less than ‘normal’ for my hotel room and I paid about 50% less than normal for the suite I got through Paypal in Vegas, so… I’m just value shopping. Plus, there’s that money problem.

Oh well. Everything will work itself out fine. I’m sure it will. I just need to not worry about it, and everything will be fine. Things will just come together. (Anyone want to help?)