A hard-earned lesson

Sorry I was a little too busy with my work to update this small site. Here is what happened during the last one and a half month.

By the way, part of my idleness is because of an incident that discouraged us a lot.

To continue with where I has left... Charlene and me were so eager with the plan. We had read the book and did a lot of research on the internet to come up with what seems like a "perfect" plan... Charlene did a lot of work because I was busy working. Days and nights we were talking about the backpack tour. I had never seen her as eager as she was.

As most students / recent graduates, budget is our constraint. Although the plan was becoming very feasible, and we had planned out our budget, to quite a detailed level, I was still not 100% certain about this part. If all things went right, we would be doing like one of the cheapest backpack tour possible in Australia!... However if something went wrong and we shot over our budget, we would still have trouble carrying out "the plan".

Two days after I last updated this blog (31st of Mar) we decided that the plan was more or less completed so I started to book the air tickets, fearing that the airfare might increase. We had done research earlier and were quite sure of all the promotions going on. I checked the airfare every few days to make sure I was aware of any fare changes.

At around 11pm, I accessed www.tigerairways.com; and alas... I was stunned.. for a moment I thought I went to the wrong page. Because all the prices were different! Entirely different! They were like twice or thrice more expensive!! Charlene was obviously not happy too. She said I should have booked the air tickets earlier (Charlene always complain about my "procastination" btw)... I was so shocked but keep telling myself to calm down, and then went to www.jetstar.com.au only to find out that all the prices there went up too! (we needed to book a pair of return tickets from TigerAir and another 4 from JetstarAir). It was obvious now that from beginning of May all the promotions ended! And we haven't booked even a single tickets!

So I sit there and calculated... each of us exceeded budget around 700... which made the entire plan infeasible. Or at least feasible but we were obviously not as happy as we had been, knowing that our effort to save money didn't pay off very well.

It was plain that we needed to change our plan. Or don't go. In the next half hour we sit there and browse through all the air tickets, and all possible plans from May to August.

Finally... alas... finally.. I was so happy that we found another perfect period to travel. In August. Airfares are much the same with only a slight increment. The 3 weeks would fit perfectly between Charlene's convocation and the date she would start working. And August is still winter down under, which means we would still have a chance to see snow on Snowy Mountain. Moreover, I even got to include a public holiday into my leaves! How cool it was.

That night we proceeded with booking most of the important air tickets.

And I'll never forget that... Don't delay unless there is a good reason.