Whew. My flight, hotel for three nights, and rental car for two days in Calgary are booked!
There are no deals on flights in Canada. I went to all the deals sites and they came up with the same prices as Westjet and Air Canada. I don’t know why I even bother; I go through this exercise every time I look for flights and end up booking directly with the airline. It’s going to cost me $450 to fly to Calgary on Sunday. Had I been willing to wait till Tuesday, I would have saved $100, but lost two full week days.
Next, I had to find a hotel. I went to my favourite hotel booking site, priceline.com. Since I like to live on the wild side, I put in a bid for a one-star hotel at $40 a night near the airport. Priceline told me to increase my bid to $57, which I did, and I got a room worth $90 a night for $57. Now, the reviews for it are concerning, but it was the same thing when I went to Savannah. There, I got $35 a night room in a $150 a night area (off season travel rocks) with a bus stop right in front that took me to the historic part of town in 10 minutes for $1. The reviews for that hotel were worse than the ones for the Calgary hotel and I ended up in a nice, newly renovated, second floor room at the back of the motel. So I’m remaining optimistic. I like that I will arrive in Calgary at about 7:30PM and that a free shuttle will take me to my hotel within minutes. I’ll reveal the hotel when I get there and am ready to review it.
Finally, I needed a car. If The Plan goes off without a hitch (can you hear me laughing?), I will only need the car Monday and Tuesday. Going straight to a couple of car rental agency sites, I got prices of $120 at the airport location and $90 for in town locations, so $60 or $45 a day. I went on a couple of deals sites and finally scored on orbitz.com with a rate of $25 a day! I’ve never been with this company, so I look forward to reviewing it. I don’t know if they would pick me up at the hotel the way that Enterprise does. If not, I checked the Calgary transit site and learned that I can get to the car rental place in about a half hour on the bus with one transfer. This was very acceptable so I booked the car.
Of course, if I have to extend my stay, I will most likely not get these same rates for subsequent nights and days. But since none of these deals are refundable, I decided to be conservative in how many nights and days I booked.
I also sent out a couple of feelers on some trucks tonight, but I don’t know if they will amount to anything. I’ll need to get on the phone at some point. There is one truck that is calling my name, but I am shying away from it because it is a 1993 with more than 300,000KM, a bit scary for a daily driver. But for the right price, it could be a serious contender.
Another candidate doesn’t have a topper, but otherwise fits all the criteria. It’s a 1994, which is also a little older than I’d like, but it only has about 150,000KM. It’s being sold by a dealership that wants $4,000 for it. Ha ha ha ha ha. That truck is worth $2,500 max. I still scheduled a test drive on Monday since I found a matching (in terms of size, not colour) canopy for it so if it works out and I can get a decent price for it, it’d be a good contender. I like the idea of buying from a dealership since I’d be able to get a warranty and might be able to skip the super thorough inspection. I don’t have a problem with salesman pressure when I go into dealerships since I walk in knowing that I want and what it’s worth, so I’m not easily swayed.
You know you’re getting old when you see an ad for a nice-looking 1989 truck and you think, “It’s not that old, I remember 1989” and then you do the math and realise that 1989 was 23 years ago!
