Where’s Logic When you Need It?

Warning: This is just me ranting about something stupid and completely out of my control, so if you are one of those people who thinks I’m adorable when I’m pissed off (why though?), please keep reading. If not, maybe you’ll at least relate.

So, I was born in Melbourne and raised in Indian Harbour Beach. Not too far away from where I was born and grew up is the Melbourne International Airport. (Locals know where this is going.) This airport is kind of a joke because for the longest time, this “international” airport only serviced to Charlotte, NC, and Atlanta, GA. There were some charter flights to the Bahamas, which you could only afford if you owned Google or something like that, and there’s cruise ships not too far away that can take you to the Bahamas and a whole bunch of other places for only a fraction of the cost. Recently, they’ve expanded to direct flights to Toronto, but other than that, they’re relatively local, compared to Orlando or Miami Airports.

One of the colleges I was accepted into (but have yet to audition for) is the University of West Florida in Pensacola, which is a good seven and a half hour drive away from my little town on the beach. If I get a car between then and now, I’ll probably drive home for Christmas, Spring Break, and the summer. But the shorter trips, like Thanksgiving (which is less than a week away from my birthday), I’m thinking I can probably fly home from the Pensacola International Airport. Trips like those, I’m thinking I’ll probably stick closest to my parents and brother, who is still living at home.

Being the responsible young woman I am (ha ha), I decided that I would look into flights home from Pensacola. I typed in the Pensacola airport, the Melbourne airport, and the days I would like to leave and go back to college for Thanksgiving break and my birthday. I thought I’d read something about Melbourne accepting flights from within the state, so I thought I would be fine. I do a little digging and I see a flight that can take me from Pensacola to Melbourne. Awesome! I can go home for Thanksgiving and spend my birthday with my family. It’s a little pricey, but I’m new at this whole “booking flights” thing, so I start reading. That’s when I realized that the flight I thought was an answer to my prayers was actually one that would fly me from Pensacola to the Atlanta International Airport, have a two-and-a-half-hour layover in Georgia, and fly to Melbourne from there. I thought that was a little bizarre and kept reading about flights from Melbourne to see if there was anything closer to what I was looking for, maybe flying to Orlando and then Melbourne. That was when I saw that, for the same price, I could fly from Melbourne to Toronto.

*takes a deep breath to avoid cursing my computer out*

So, let me get this straight. I can’t fly from Pensacola to Melbourne, which is in the same state, but for the same price it takes to fly me directly from Melbourne to Toronto (yes, in Canada), I can take two flights and go to Atlanta, where I can hang out in an airport for a few hours, and go home. I can go three hundred miles out of my way and THEN go home for the same price I can visit my dear friend in Toronto if I left from home.

Now I crunched some numbers, and it would actually be much cheaper, if a bit longer, to drive home than it would be if I flew home from the Pensacola airport. And that’s counting gas on the way home, maybe getting a quick bite to eat at a fast-food place or gas station (or maybe visiting a friend on the way home. I have friends spread all over Florida), stopping for tolls, sitting in traffic because let’s be real here, traffic during the holidays is a nightmare, and any other expenses. Now, compare that to gas money to get from my dorm to the airport in Pensacola (which is only a blessed 15 minutes away), parking, checking my baggage, my airline ticket to Atlanta, getting a bite to eat in the airport there (airport food is expensive), my flight to Melbourne, and getting home from there. I would have to spend over a thousand dollars to visit my family for four days, only to fly my sorry butt home early because I have not one, but TWO airports to deal with. What’s the point of leaving the state just to get home from PENSA-F*CKING-COLA?!?!?!

And for those of you complaining that this is a first-world problem, yes, I realize that. I realize that this is probably a stupid thing to rant about and that there are people in the world who have worse problems than I do, but let me just explain. If I get into UWF’s music school, it’s very unlikely that I’ll be home until Thanksgiving/my birthday. That will have been a good four months since I saw my family and the town I grew up in. I get homesick very easily and I tend to panic when I don’t have my family’s opinion on something. I just wanna spend the holidays with my family without having to worry about paying rent.

Honestly, at this point in time, I might as well stay in Pensacola.