As you may know, if you're a contestant on Jeopardy! and you don't already live in the L.A. area, you have to pay your own way out there, pay for your hotel, etc. On the other hand, if you come in dead last, you win $1000, so the trip will likely pay for itself.
We lucked out. We found el cheapo flights on the web ($200 and change round trip each from Providence to LAX). And we had a voucher, so a lot of that flying was free. And in the process of finding that voucher I found an older airline voucher that I thought I had accidentally thrown out years ago, so I think we netted money on the flights. We got rooms in the same hotel that Jeopardy! recommends for a lot cheaper on the web. We got a rental car for like $15/day. We were all set to fly out on Saturday December 5, drive up the coast to see our friends Dan and Jenny in Santa Barbara, hang out a couple days, drive back to L.A. at a leisurely pace and check into the hotel.
Except the Friday morning the day before we were supposed to fly out, the weather forecast kept getting worse. They were predicting snowfall for Saturday in feet, not inches. I called the airline and pleaded with them to help me - they let me change our flights for free - from a Saturday departure from Providence to a Friday night departure from Boston. How nice of them! We had a great time staying over in Chicago with Bob and Gigi Friday night and had a totally uneventful connecting flight to LAX on Saturday.
The weekend with Dan and Jenny was also a whole lot of fun, and we found the hotel, did some last-minute clothes shopping and everything!
The actual taping day
