Ah, planes. I'm really thankful for them. They make it so much easier to travel to places that are very far away from wherever you are at the moment. I think back to the days when people had to take trains and ships, and then I think back even farther to the days when people had to take horse-drawn carts and wooden boats, and I realize that I live in a pretty good time period for far-away traveling.
Or do I?
Plane tickets are EXPENSIVE. I feel like I have to give one arm in order to be admitted on a plane, and if we're talking first class then I would probably have to give up my firstborn child. For real. It's a lot of money. At least, it is for me, as a student with loans and a minimum wage part-time job. I'm doing this all on my own, and the financial part is hard. I'm just thankful I can afford a ticket at all.
In order to afford this ticket and still be able to pay for other necessities in life, I had to search around for deals. The first site I went to was Skyscanner. I highly recommend this site. It continually has some of the lowest air fares that I've ever seen. Other sites I went to were Kayak and Hipmunk. All of them gave me good airfare options, but they were still quite expensive. I was searching for the deal. You know, that elusive, once-in-a-lifetime ticket that is unbelievably cheap yet still gets you to your destination on an actual passenger flight? Maybe I was foolish in thinking I would find this deal, but I held out anyway because I was very determined to spend as little as possible on my ticket so I would have as much extra money as possible for getting what I will need when I'm actually in Germany.
And wouldn't you know it, a friend of mine told me about STA travel. It's a business that caters directly to students, teachers, and young adults. I knew that I wouldn't be a student by the time I went to Germany, but I was under 26, which qualified me for their special rates. And boy, did they have special rates! Seriously, the flights here were way cheaper than anything I saw on the other websites.
Then I found it. That once-in-a-lifetime ticket that was unbelievably cheap yet still involved a real passenger airplane. It was a one-way ticket to Düsseldorf that cost me a good $200+ less than any other flight that I'd looked at. So I snatched it up. And now I have a flight booked to Germany for insanely cheap (well, that's pretty relative, but for one-way airfare it's insanely cheap!). Side note: for some reason, it is much cheaper to fly into Düsseldorf or Berlin that it is to fly into any other airport, with Frankfurt coming in close behind. Just a trend I noticed.
The catch is that this flight has a 10 hour layover, which brings my total traveling time to about 24 hours. Yeah, it's not the best situation, but who cares??? I got an amazing deal!!! I am very willing to spend 10 hours at an airport if that means I pay a lot less for my ticket. Besides, I saw tickets that were way more expensive that also had long layovers. And on the bright side, it will be next to impossible for me to miss my connecting flight, with all the spare time I have :)
So it's official. I'm going to Germany. I can't wait!
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