Les Bonnes Choses

Jude, Nana and I returned to Chicago via Amtrak yesterday, and I have now almost exhausted all possible modes of travel between my hometown and Chicago. I am still investigating whether I can charter either a boat or submarine to travel up the Thames to get out to the great lakes. It's too far to canoe. All-in-all, if you can afford the time, it's not a bad way to go. It takes a bit longer than driving the distance, door-to-door, but considering I didn't have to pay attention to the road and had a splitting headache the whole trip, it beats driving, all else being equal.

One thing that was not equal was the fares I paid for the tickets. I had to buy Jude and Nana's round-trip tickets separate from my one-way ticket on the Amtrak website, owing to limitations on their interface design. It wasn't until I printed up both sets of tickets the night before that I noticed the fares. My mom's regular adult fare: $42. My AAA Adult fare: $47.70. Unfortunately, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for my apparent -$5.70 discount, which was that, although purchased 5 minutes apart, as seats get snapped up, the price of the remaining seats also increases. I kind of would rather have been the victim of a bizarre pricing scheme than a shopping cart limitation and the laws of supply and demand.