The Cost of a White Christmas

I got snow for Christmas this year!

If I had been in Chicago, I would have had A LOT more snow, but this was good enough for me to classify as a White Christmas.

"Shoveling" snow:
Even though we didn’t get the joy of Chicago’s snowstorm in Springfield, I felt the effects of their whopper of a snowstorm. We were supposed to fly out of Springfield on the day after Christmas (Saturday) at 2:15 pm, then connect in O’Hare to Phoenix. At 11:00 am, all flights were scheduled to go on time. At 12:30 pm, all flights were canceled due to the weather. I called American Airlines and the soonest they could get us on a flight was Tuesday!! Pat was all for staying in Illinois for three more days, but I missed my puppies and I wanted to go home.

I went online and Southwest still had tickets available for their evening flight out of St. Louis that day. Amy and Lane hadn’t left to go home yet, so I was able to buy the tickets ($417 each!) and hitch a ride to the St. Louis airport with them. On our drive to St. Louis, it snowstormed for most of the way:
The crappy thing about all this was that I spent many, many hours looking for the best flight prices to get home for Christmas this year. I checked every airline in and out of Springfield, St. Louis, Chicago and Indianapolis. I checked one ways and roundtrips, airline websites and cheap ticket websites, even checked a travel agent via my new brother-in-law. We ended up with US Airways to STL on the outbound and American out of Springfield on the return for a total of $525 per person. Yikes! Then the stinkin’ snowstorm ruined all of my hard work! American is refunding our return flight, but we still paid extra to get home on Southwest, making our roundtrip cost $635! What a waste of time looking for a “deal”.