Good News / Bad News

(By: Chip Schultz)

As a general rule, when presented with the delivery of news in the two traditional formats, I usually ask for the bad news first. This post is no different; except that I am now the bearer of said news - both the good and the bad.

So here it is; the BAD NEWS first...

Having been tracking airfare for the past few months, I have become quite aware of what the cheap rates are, as opposed to the not-so-cheap rates. My research began on Expedia.com, where I could enter all of my travel criteria. Then, just about weekly, if not daily, I would track various airlines and flights from Boise, Idaho to Washington D.C. Eventually, I realized that the cheapest fares would be with Southwest Airlines; and that Southwest doesn't charge for checked baggage - with six travelers, that was a big bonus! So I exclusively stalked Southwest.com and found tickets that were well within our budget. Unfortunately, we still had to save a bit more to be able to make the big purchase. So we would wait and wait; watch those ticket prices go up and up. And as Murphy's Law would again prove to be true, we did finally come up with our cash funding - but not before those tickets were eventually going for more than $700 each. At that price, our budget would have INCREASED by nearly $2500! Yes, it is bad news, but we had to postpone our trip to a date when ticket prices come back down.

But wait, the GOOD NEWS is...

By pushing out our departure date by only 4 weeks, tickets prices came right back into our budget. And this time we were ready! So on March 4th we made the big leap and purchased our airline tickets for Washington D.C.!

Our new departure date is Friday, April 22nd, so our itinerary stays the same. And more GOOD NEWS: Instead of taking care packages to Wounded Warriors at Walter Reed Medical on Sunday... we will now be taking Easter Baskets!
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