Kumquats!

Now that we've decided we're going with myguideBritain for the travel reservations and we decided to fly Aer Lingus - I called Aer Lingus today to get a final quote on the flights so I knew how much we need to save before we could make the flight reservations and therefore make the travel reservations. Well apparently Aer Lingus has not "loaded" their LAX times yet and so I'm to call back in two weeks.

ARGH! I just want to make the plans so I know what's going on and I know we're getting the best deal we can by booking as soon as possible. Now we've got to wait another two weeks - and hopefully then Aer Lingus will have their LAX times in order. I suppose I should just stop my bitching. Beggers can't be choosers - now can we? I did go onto Aer Lingus' site and put in some dates for March - and have estimated our final price for the flights to be around $1,600. Wow that's a lot. It also sucks monkey butt that we'll be paying over $400 for the fuel surcharge & taxes. I thought that's what the tickets were paying for - fuel. Why are we now paying a surcharge?!

I've also decided, without speaking to Paul, not to get that British Heritage Pass (the pass that allowed us free access into individual sites). I've realized there is a lot of stuff we can't see that's on their list and a lot of stuff we WANT to see that's NOT on their list. Not worth the $15 a day when we wont be doing stuff every day. I promised Paul that if we went for two weeks we'd relax and do some non-site-seeing days too. I figure we'll be resting in Glasgow, Portree, Inverness, Aberdeen & Edinburgh because we'll be there for more than one day. Our other two stops will be purely for site-seeing enjoyment!

I've chosen some stuff I want to see, I'll post it soon!

Two Weeks?!

As I posted earlier this weekend - I was considering getting some pricing information on a two week trip since I was feeling very rushed with our one week trip. Also, I wanted to move it later in the year. So I talked to the woman I was working with at myguideBritain and she created us a new itinerary with prices based on end of April beginning of May. So the cities we're thinking about visiting now are:

Arriving in Edinburgh
1st two nights in Glasgow
1 night in Fort William
2 nights on the Isle of Skye in the town on Portee
3 nights in Inverness
2 nights in Aberdeen
1 night in Stirling
3 nights Edinburgh
Leaving from Edinburgh

The trip costs has doubled - but considering we've moved slightly into the "high season" I don't think that's too bad. I'm thinking that Paul and I are still going to do it and just be very, very budget conscious for the next six months. We're only going to do this once! We need to make it count.

To save some money we are going to fly with Aer Lingus and we're going to take advantage of this Great British Heritage Pass where you buy a pass for a number of days and it'll get you in free to a lot of attractions. It's going to be $15 a day for Paul and I (combined!) so that's pretty good considering that a few places are 11GBP per person. I'd like to do all that stuff off of the beaten path - but I also want to be able to say I've seen those places everyone talks about when they talk about Scotland. Plus we pay ONE time and know where our budget is after that instead of getting to the 8th day and realizing we can't see anything else.

One question for anyone who lives in the UK: I've priced out everything but petrol and food. Can someone tell me the average cost of a meal when eating out and also the average cost of petrol? I know that the petrol prices will likely change by next year - but I'd still like to get a rough estimate now...