Zut Alors!

Well, my intended travel plans for a study-travel in Scotland towards my MA have been alas been cancelled.

There are many reasons... but the main one is money.

The course, three weeks in Scotland, is $3,800 per person. This was only a little bit more than I expected (I was expecting in the realm of $3,200-3,400 for the whole thing, but the $3,800 figure would have included a rental car at my family's disposal so my wife and daughter could do something off-tour).

The $3,800 includes the following: all travel within Scotland, all accomodations, all breakfasts and dinners, most lunches (but the places we would have stayed in had kitchenette facilities), and admissions to all the various sites on the itinerary. Not bad value for the money! I must hasten to add that SFU travel study is run on a cost-recovery basis - that is, there's no "profit" margin built into that price. If I went out to replicate the itinerary day for day, I would probably even end up paying more since I wouldn't be getting any group rates.

But outside the base price, the costs started to escalate. Airfare, what's currently available for the dates in question, was going to add about $3,400 to the mix. I know that you can get $600-700 flights to Glasgow from Vancouver right now at flightcentre.ca, but that's for travel in the very near future. Come May, those fares might still hold, but I'm not willing to take the risk.

Then there's the unfortunate surprise that in order to get course credit for it, I would have to pay the tuition equivalent to one course, which, factoring in textbooks, adds another $1,000. I should have expected the need to pay tuition above and beyond, but still...

A $12,000 commitment before even buying one dram of whisky in a Scottish pub.

$12,000 is "trip of a lifetime" money.

I'm sure Scotland is a beautiful country (and my wife assures me it is), but it's not a trip of a lifetime destination.

So no travel study this year. As I won't be done my MA until 2008, there's always the summer of 2007's travel study trip, wherever it might be. Last year's trip was four weeks in Italy and Switzerland; this year is the Scottish trip; next year's is yet to be announced, but will undoubtedly be somewhere in Europe again.