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Airfare sucks
Yet another reason as to why I can't go to Reno, as much as it'd be fun:
I haven't even factored parking costs into the Seattle option, which would add more to it unless I knew someone there who'd let me park my car for a week. Even then, that's a lot of driving. Having a SMART car is the only reason the Seattle option even looks as good as it does. It sucks having an automatic $100 added as fuel surcharge for crossing the border...
I think I've picked a good time to make this my last year of playing in many Scrabble tournaments abroad. I'm gonna be sticking to tournaments almost exclusively close to home starting 2009.
Flight City | Airfare | Driving Costs (from Kelowna) | Fly Time (round trip) | Drive Time (round trip) | Total |
| Seattle, WA | $260 | $140 | 4 hours | 14 hours | $400 |
| Vancouver, BC | $440 | $100 | 6 hours | 10 hours | $540 |
| Kelowna, BC | $560 | $0 | 10 hours | 0 hours | $560 |
I haven't even factored parking costs into the Seattle option, which would add more to it unless I knew someone there who'd let me park my car for a week. Even then, that's a lot of driving. Having a SMART car is the only reason the Seattle option even looks as good as it does. It sucks having an automatic $100 added as fuel surcharge for crossing the border...
I think I've picked a good time to make this my last year of playing in many Scrabble tournaments abroad. I'm gonna be sticking to tournaments almost exclusively close to home starting 2009.
Brutal driving costs!
Re: Brutal driving costs!
Re: Brutal driving costs!
And yeah, the fuel surcharge is for the flights, not the driving. It's basically a flat rate of $50 one way per flight, just for crossing the Canadian/US border, so it's another $100 tacked on just for leaving the country.
Just wait until the next NSC when airline prices continue to rise. If they don't get the picture and hold the event somewhere that's isn't so freaking expensive, they won't have a good turnout ever again...
Re: Brutal driving costs!
Re: Brutal driving costs!
Re: Brutal driving costs!
I have the idea that it might result in an expansion of Internet use to play tournaments, sometime. There is a LAN cafe almost anywhere, and I'm sure some set of protocols could be drawn up that would be satisfactory in limiting player augmentation. I think it's probably quite feasible to already accomplish, and much like video games, Scrabble just doesn't have that large a market to really garner more than one or two huge events in a year. For instance, FPS (yes Conrad, they suck, but they're bigger than Scrabble and will almost definitely stay that way) is global and only has about 5 major events that are large LAN parties. That's even across the world, and utilizing more than one FPS or popular online game.
Who knows... the economics of travel are very quickly redefining themselves. That's all I know.