Getting There: Trip Planning

I've spent some time recently poking at my transit options for my big Apple Festival/Rhinebeck trip in October. The travel-to-be-booked consists of three parts:

1. Getting from Florida to Syracuse
2. Getting from Syracuse to Boston
3. Getting from Boston back to Florida

The third one is the easiest, since I can take a nice nonstop with JetBlue, very much terra cognita for me after years of traveling this route for visits. I haven't booked the flight yet, but I'm watching and hoping that the price may dip.

For the second one, I think I'm going to take the train instead of flying. As I mentioned before, the only two nonstop flights have me choosing between leaving at 5 AM (ha, no) and arriving at 10 PM (also a no), and even the easiest of non-nonstop options is neither all that cheap nor all that easy. Hello, Amtrak.

For the first leg, I finally picked the least unpalatable of the options. The only nonstops for the route from the Ft Myers area to Syracuse are seasonal, not starting until November, on the budget airlines, and if you think regular flying is bare-bones these days, you should try Frontier. It's cheap, and it gets you there, but I'm not altogether sorry they're not available for this trip. Instead, I'll be flying American, so we'll see how that stacks up compared to JetBlue.

I've been using Kayak for info-gathering, and they will email me to ask if I want to check fares on routes I had been looking at. Once I booked this flight, I didn't need to see updates for that route any more, so I clicked on the link to unsubscribe, and had to laugh at how they conveyed the got-it message:

I do love a sense of humor.