This past March, I left the chilly days in Indiana to head down to central Florida to attend an amazing conference. Since I had just driven down to Florida to visit some friends during for my Spring break, I really wasn't up for driving again. As a result, I thought that it would be a great idea to look up some air fares on one of the various low fare airline websites available on the internet. I ended up finding a really great price on a round trip ticket from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Gainesville, Florida. Now that the Summer has come around, I need to start thinking ahead when it comes to air fare. This Summer, I'm going to have to head home twice...more than I've gone home in the past, but for good reasons. Both my best friend and my brother are getting married within a few weeks of one another in July and August. I'm not really interested in making the twelve hour drive home and back twice to central New York this summer, so I was thinking that I would try and find some cheap air fare so that I wouldn't have to put the miles on my car or waste my time driving and potentially contend with the weather when driving home. I looked back on those same cheap travel sites that I had referenced when I was going to get ready to travel to Florida this Spring, and I was amazed to find that the prices were far far higher than they were just a few months ago. I later learned, after reading some great articles on the internet, that the airlines have jacked up the prices for the summer months. Why...I don't really know...and neither do they as it appears. All I know, and all that we need to know as the travel consumers of America, is that we're going to have to shell out far more money this year for our air travel. This is really reminiscent of back several years ago after the tragedies of September eleventh when air travel became very difficult and extremely expensive. Since those events over six years ago, the prices associated with air travel have fluctuated, but most have remained on the reasonable side of our wallets. It has been only recently that the prices have started to skyrocket to near where the prices were back then. As it turns out, I might have to think about driving home after all this summer for at least one of the weddings. Who even knows what will end up being the more expensive venture...air travel or travel by automobile. Now that gasoline prices have begun to jump sky high once again, it might even be a question as to which method of travel is going to be cheaper...and less time consuming. Anyways, it is not, of course, a matter of whether or not I will be going up to New York for these two very important weddings this Summer, but it's a matter of how I'm going to be getting there for the least amount of money for the least hassle. I read in an article recently on one of the news agency websites that I frequent that the average airfare for domestic travel in America comes out to awfully close to four hundred dollars. Sometimes it's even the shorter flights that end up being most expensive. I recall vividly that it used to be far more expensive to travel from Tallahassee to the hub airport in Atlanta, than it was from Atlanta to travel home to central New York. That's a difference of hundreds of miles! It all comes down to the size of and the traffic through any given airport. I thought that travel from a bigger airport where I currently live would be cheaper. Of course it was back in March when I bought my tickets, but it's a definitely different story now...just two months later. Even those usual tricks of trying to schedule your flight early don't seem to work. I was debating on whether or not to go ahead and bite the bullet and schedule my plans and get my itinerary for at least one of my trips. I thought that things might calm down a bit over the next few weeks and those "calmings" will be reflected in the air fare prices. I'm sure that I'm just being the optimist that I usually try to be when I'm thinking about my Summer travel plans, but I've got to put on a happy face when it comes to these ideas, right?