Chrissie just started an interesting post over on her blog about places she’s been.
Here’s my list:

• Toronto, lived there 4 months
• Ottawa, lived there 4 months
• San Francisco, holidayed 1 week
• San Jose, conferenced 6 days
• Cupertino, trespassed for 2 hours
• Southampton, England, girlfriended 1 week
• Greenwich, brothered 4 days
• Trinidad, visited grandparents 5 months
• Seattle, lived there 4 months
• Montreal, 1 week
• Vancouver, lived there 4 months too.

And now I’m in Sarasota, Florida. Travelling is fun. I’d really like to visit Thailand; I’ve got a few friends who have been and everything they’ve told me about it is pretty neat. Spain, Sweden, Italy and Greece are also up there. Germany too. I’d really like to go to Berlin at some point.

I’m not really a gambling kinda guy, but I found out a few things today that helped turn me into one:

• The refundable-type airline tickets cost more than twice as much as the non-refundable ones
• Cancelling/changing dates on a non-refundable ticket costs US$100. You’ll get credit later with the respective carriers (though I’m not sure what happens when you cancel a flight involving multiple carriers. Multiple credits?)

I checked Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, and Travelocity.com for a return flight prices on a ticket from Tampa to Vancouver from Dec 20th to Jan 3rd. Travelocity said nothing was available during those dates. Expedia found tickets; the cheapest was $806. Orbitz’s was $560 (!).
I decided to book the ticket through Orbitz, even though I’d never used their services before. “Error 101. Selected flight not available. Please select another from the list.” And so I clicked the next one down, a $605 flight. “Error 101. Selected flight not available. Please select another from the list”. So I chose the next one down, for $630. Same thing. Hmmm. The next 10 flights down all gave me the same error. I ended up finding one that was available at the $790 mark, but the return portion of the trip was leaving Vancouver at 9:30am. That would be an awfully tight connection if I was taking the ferry over.
So, still on Orbitz.com, I decided to change my destination from Vancouver to Victoria to avoid the ferry hassle. In the result list lay a ticket for $832. “I’ll take it!”. I didn’t bother checking Expedia, and with Travelocity, if they had nothing from Tampa to Vancouver, I can’t see how they’d have anything for this flight. I went to purchase the ticket and BAM! “We need to charge you another $20 for FedEx to courier your ticket to you, this is a paper-only ticket”. Oh man, come on guys, get with the 80’s! Electronic tickets are where it’s at!
Grand total after everything was said and done? $857.37. Oops, not quite everything; I’ve got to factor in $84 for long term parking at the Tampa airport (it’s still cheaper than flying directly out of Sarasota). That’s $941 something. Plus airport improvement fees of $5 each way, I think.
So now I’ve got a ticket. Too bad I still don’t know if the company is going to be closed between Christmas and New Years. It’s a $100 gamble, yeah, but a gamble I think’s gonna pay off.