Huyen and I have been planning a trip to New York for a few days in the coming months. When I was there in November, I wasn’t ready to come back home, so I vowed to return again before long and visit all those other restaurants, record shops, clubs, and museums I wanted to hit.

In the course of planning, though, I’ve found some interesting things, as well as one really annoying thing.

First of all, the annoying thing. I’m trying to book a room at the Jazz On the Park Hostel. I go to their reservations sections, tell it I want a room for five nights and give it the starting date. It returns a grid of what types of rooms (private, dorm, etc.) are open for those nights. I see that there’s a Twin Private room (two beds for two people, the only type of private room they have for two) that’s available all five nights. So I tell it to book it for two people. I get back an error that reads “NOTE: Insufficient beds available in the room you selected, we have selected rooms with enough beds to accommodate your group.” The reservation has been changed to a 12-person mixed dorm room. I don’t think so.

So I tried booking a twin private for one person. Same error. A single private for one person. Same error. I want to give these people my freaking money and they won’t let me. I’ve e-mailed the site that handles the booking to see what they say. Otherwise I may have to see if they take phone reservations.

Figuring out how we want to go is the next issue. I decided to price out all forms of travel to see which is the cheapest. Here are the options from most expensive to least expensive (prices are for two people):

1. Most Expensive: Amtrak – $320, plus we’d have to find our way to a station. The closest is 45 minutes away.
2. Independence Air – $230 + between $20 and $40 to get from the airport to the city
3. Driving – about $220 ($30 in gas, about $150 to park at the Port Authority bus station ($25/night), about $40 in tolls)
4. Driving, renting a car one-way up and back – about $148 $167 ($108 $127 for the car, about $40 in tolls)
5. Greyhound – $116 with 7-day advance purchase.
6. The infamous Chinatown buses – $40

Greyhound also leaves not far from our house. However, it requires a switchover in DC (which I’ve done twice in the past and both times it’s been a debacle) and their time schedule for the days we want sucks. One way is about 7 1/2 hours, though I’ve always found Greyhound always gets to their destination early. Yeah, the bus sucks, but that’s quite a savings versus flying or the train.

Viren suggested what turned out to be two of the three cheapest options. I actually really like the renting a car idea, one-way in each direction (unlimited miles). Gives us a little more flexibility and, yeah, I’d have to drive in the city for a short bit, but I think I could handle it. Plus, if we wanted to stop off in Jersey to visit my family on the way back, we could.

I love planning trips (and no, that wasn’t typed in a sarcastic tone).

Just got back from dropping a few grand on furniture. I’m still limping from the pain.

We spent a couple of weeks trying to decide between two sofas (one was a “chofa” and I swear to you I will never use the word “chofa” again on this site). Being the indecisive pair that we are, we decided to buy both and use one for the living room and the other for the family room. Considering we haven’t purchased any furniture since we moved into our house five years ago (and that was only a bed for the guest room), it’s not really all that painful to drop some dough.

Now comes the 8-12 weeks of waiting.