It's amazing...

I am in the process of planning some sort of wild and crazy Spring Break trip right now (by wild and crazy, I mean sort of out of the blue type, some place I've never been before). I'm a transportation planner and I know that there is really no rhyme or reason as to the pricing scheme airlines use in calculating their ticket prices, but I've been really amazed at some of the results for some cities I've been considering, that they're all ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME PRICE FOR THE SAME DATES. No biggie, you say? Here are some of the cities I'm considering for March 7/8/9 - March 14/15:
Helena, MT
Anchorage, AK
Honolulu, HI

Again, no big deal--they're US cities, and capitals of their respective states, but here are two more cities I've looked at:
Edinburgh, Scotland
Budapest, Hungary (Why Budapest? I know someone who teaches at a Christian school there from Trinity in Montgomery and has an open invitation for anyone to come visit him).

They're all within $100 of eachother, despite the fact that I HAVE TO CROSS AN OCEAN AND FLY INTO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY COMPLETELY. (I have to cross an ocean to Honolulu, but it's still in the US). I think the Edinburgh flight may actually be the cheapest of them all (granted, it is a direct flight out of Atlanta, but still).

Anyway, here are my plans for Saturday:
1. NOT STUDY
2. Straighten/Clean my apartment and car
3. Help Colin & Heather Chapell move across town (PCA folks...might recognize that name: Colin is Bryan Chapell's son and is a Ph.D. student here at UA, Heather is the Director of Youth and College Ministries at Riverwood, basically what Tim was doing before July, but without the ordination).
4. NOT STUDY

Exam run-down:
1. Urban Analysis Planning: One essay. Professor said with kind of a smirk on his face, "I don't think you'll find this too painful. You've had enough pain all semester." Half the class of all grad students, including me, finished it in a half hour. The rest were probably 35 minutes finishing it. I was struggling to get three pages--going only one line onto the third page (not "front and back", one whole page front and back, then one line onto the front of the next). Ask me about the mutant race of clowns.
2. GIS-T: Took two hours, but not too bad. One (of six) definitions I was weak on. The essay I wasn't terribly strong on, but I think I got it (and hope I clearly articulated what I was trying to get across). I felt good about the two procedure questions. One we had to find the distance between two places using the gravity model with known variables. It was basic Algebra, but if you didn't know how to work the equation in the first place, you'd be lost. All my results came out nice even numbers, so I must have done something right there (and I plugged them back in and got the right answer). The second was calculating a network autocorrelation/Moran's I on traffic accidents for a 100 mi. stretch of I-10 in Arizona. This is something that can be done easily in Excel, or in GIS with a simple algorithm, but we had to do this by hand. I got my results (Moran's I = 0.93 for this stretch--meaning higher accident values tend to cluster together), and looked back at the map where we got the accident data, and it seemed to be reasonable.

I also got my second non-thesis project idea approved. Basically it's my Richmond project from this semester using ONLY Richmond, then adding three other cities of similar size across the country (Boise, ID; Des Moines, IA; Mobile, AL), add a few more things to look at (fire station coverage of schools, population, etc.) and compare and contract the four cities. I start this up on Monday, and thus ends my holiday--which is why I'm planning a big shebang of a Spring Break trip, since all my non-thesis work should have final drafts turned in by then (to the first reader at least...the second, from what I can ascertain, is somewhat of a formality to avoid any conflicts of interest)