Poor People Traveling

   Buying plane tickets is probably the most stressful thing I've ever done in my entire life. I'm not sure how some people do this on the regular. Those 'some people' are probably rich people who don't have to worry about paying an extra $20 for a flight if you miss a deal by just a few seconds. Poor people have to worry about those sorts of things though. We have to use discount sites with wild layovers and have full discussions about how we're going to avoid having to check any bags despite the fact that we're going to be out of the country for three weeks. It's a wild, extravagant, stressful, and horrifying experience! Why in the world do people do this to themselves! I am never trusting another travel blog again because those people either have never traveled or are rich beyond my wildest dreams and I can't live knowing either of those things. I'd be lying if I didn't say I'm not jealous of those who're rich enough to travel without the minute fears and concerns experienced by us, the poorer of the world, but the world needs to stop acting like travel is cheap. As of right now I have had it completely with Facebook posts that compare the cost of phones and whatnot to the cost of plane tickets expecting us all to understand that 'traveling the world is affordable if you try' or whatever because that is all bull. Plane tickets are not only never as cheap as they label, but it forgets added costs even at the airport, let alone the cost of housing, food, literally everything else that comes with a trip? Like, I sure hope you have a nice 5 hour layover at the airport before you get right back onto your return flight because the only thing you've budgeted is the round-trip part of this experience.

    Given all of this in advance, Jess and I have been losing our minds trying to book our flights to and around Europe for our upcoming trip and it's not going well. First and foremost we've never done this before, which is half the fault of our fate cause we were born to a poor family, and partially the fault of our parents who raised two nervous wrecks. I almost had a heart attack booking the AirBnB for Paris. I literally had heart palpitations. I just wasn't built for this kind of pressure! I get nervous spending a gift card at IHOP, why would I be okay approving of a near $200 purchase? That being said, we've got AirBnB's set up for Paris and Lisbon, and flights to Ireland and home from Portugal, so some of this event is planned out, stress ulcer included. Unplanned as of yet is the whole of the Ireland stay, and flights from Ireland to Paris, and Paris to Portugal. It's important to note at this point that the only reason we're going on this trip to begin with is because Jess won a grant to study in Portugal. We wanted to just take a day-trip to Paris while we were there, but somewhere along the way our mother decided we needed to spend 3 months bouncing around Europe, specifically Ireland. That was never gonna fly with Jess and I, who have in our 20 years on this earth only left the country once, and it was to Canada for like 3 days. Not to mention I would like to spend some of my summer at my house that I am paying for, thank you very much. So we were originally going to say no completely, I was sticking with that, but mom got Jess on the phone and wore her down and now we're spending 7 days or so in Ireland. She wants us to meet all our relatives, but she mostly wants us to do it because all our cousins have done it and we're all apparently in constant competition for Best Grandchild, a contest none of us cousins are privy to or care much about. Regardless, the trip is now a 3 week adventure, starting in Ireland where we're going to be staying with relatives in different parts, then to Paris which is what I'm looking forward to, and then, finally, to Portugal for 10 days to do the research we set out to do to begin with. It's all so complicated.

    Today was spent attempting to purchase at least one of the inter-European flights but it was sadly put to a halt by a series of unforeseen complications. First the site, upon purchase, needed to text the number associated with the card to confirm the flight, which makes sense for security. Unfortunately, the card is attached to one of my parents phones because Jess and I have never done any of this before and have never needed a credit card. So, we need to get our parents to text us the number. No can do. Mom is MIA most of the day and dad's at work. Once we get mom answering she says the card is connected to dad's phone, which he has with him at work. At 9:00pm mom says she has dad on board to text the response in a timely manner. We get it done, boom, finished! Except no, the card gets declined. We try again, same result. All that work, all day, for nothing. Now, it's important to keep in mind that the site we are trying to use in this scenario is a different one than the site used for our previous flights. The same flight is available at on the previous site we used but we chose to go through all of these different hoops to save a grand total of $46 dollars. Total. We are absolutely out of our mind, we know, but when you're as poor as we are $46 dollars makes a huge difference. We spend $20 every 2 weeks on groceries and we think that's exorbitant. We totally get it from our parents though so really all of this is there fault. They didn't get wealthy before they had us, and then ingrained in us a deep and heart-wrenching fear of spending any kind of money.

    This nit-picking money spending is exactly what I'm talking about when I say rich people and poor people traveling are two totally different things. There are a zillion stressors involved in poor people traveling that rich people travelers couldn't even dream up. We watched Barbie, A Fashion Fairytale the other day, and Barbie just legit hops on a flight to Paris within a day. I can't even imagine such a thing, like, that's the fairytale part of this whole story. When I watched that movie previously all of that passed me by as usual and regular, but post-poor people travel planning I was chomping at the bits at the luxury I was witnessing on my screen. That's the kinda rich I wanna get to in my life: Just hop on a plane the day you plan to travel. Until then, however, I'll be strapped to my computer, clearing cookies and refreshing cheap airline tickets.