I’ve been thinking about the places I’d like to go to this year. My work trip to DC is pretty much a foregone conclusion but I’ve been thinking about visiting my folks in South Carolina for Mothers Day. So I looked to compare three methods of travel and what I found was hilarious (all computations were for two adults):

By Air

1. ORD – CLT = $658.60
2. MDW – CLT = $658.00 on AirTran / $489.80 on Southwest, but Southwest only flies to Greenville SC, a two hour car ride from Rock Hill, SC.
3. AZO – CLT = $1123.40
4. GRR – CLT = $720.60

By Automobile

1. The trip is 736 miles each way, my Santa Fe gets 374 miles per tank, that’s nearly 2 tanks of gasoline. With an average cost of $3.60 per gallon that’s $71.28 per tank. Each leg of the trip is $140. Total is $280.
2. Trip time is 12h 31m.

By Train

1. Amtrak can get two people from Kalamazoo to Charlotte. They do it by sending us to Chicago, then DC, then Charlotte. It’s $678.00 and each trip takes 35h 44m!

So, with money being tight I have to be very picky about where I go and how I get there. For this plan, if it actually comes, the most convenient and cheapest by far is to use my car. The train prices and times were comically absurd and flying out of AZO? With prices like that, why do we have an airport even? It’s laughably bad.