Dan's Drivelings » Travel

My first ever “mileage run” completed

Dan Skaggs — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:34:23 +0000

Yesterday I did something that I would have never thought I would do. I rode around in various airplanes just for the sake of riding in airplanes—I took a “mileage run”. Mileage runs are tickets purchased for the express purpose of gaining frequent flyer miles or segments.

In my case, I needed segments. Six to be precise. I was six segments shy of making Premier Executive on United Airlines (their middle tier of frequent flyer elite membership). My wife and girls were scheduled to be out of town, so I booked a 6-segment round trip that covered 5 states in 24 hours. I left at 8:30am Saturday morning and touched down at 8:23am Sunday morning. The route that I took is below:

Nashville to Denver
Denver to Los Angeles
Los Angeles to San Francisco
San Francisco to Seattle
Seattle to Chicago O’Hare
Chicago to Nashville

That 5-state, 24-hour flight put me at 60 segments on United and their partners for the year. I have to go back out to San Francisco on Friday this week for a weekend full of company meetings. Having made Premier Executive will allow me to earn double miles on that trip. Between the mileage run and the weekend trip, I’ll earn over 18,000 miles in the space of a week.

I booked the mileage run through CheapTickets.com for less than $310. Based on how many miles I earned on the trip (30% bonus because I was a current Premier level), that came out to 4.7 cents per mile. You can’t buy them outright that cheaply.

As another plus, I got to catch up on some reading and finished two 500-750 page novels that I’d been wanted to read before I got home.

It was an interesting experience. I don’t know that I would do that specific routing again, but I like flying enough that I would definitely consider another run to keep my status.

I’m going to cf.Objective() — Are you?

Dan Skaggs — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:25:05 +0000

I’m so pumped!

Stuck in D.C.

Dan Skaggs — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 17:12:29 +0000

Thanks to a late afternoon winter storm yesterday, I am spending the weekend in Chantilly, VA. I was due to go home yesterday (and really looking forward to it too!) but the storm cancelled most of the flights out of Dulles and I was told they couldn’t get me back to Nashville until Sunday. Since I had to be back up here Monday, it didn’t make sense to do that, so I’m just not going home this weekend.

Personna Me

Dan Skaggs — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:43:43 +0000

Tim Buntel

Adobe MAX kicks off today

Dan Skaggs — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 16:21:35 +0000

Adobe MAX officially began today–sadly without me this year. This year marks only the second time since I started going to the event (then called DevCon) in 2000. Alas, having recently become completely self-employed, I couldn’t justify taking a week without pay at this point.

Ben Forta posted an entry to his blog yesterday saying that the opening keynote for this morning was to be awe-inspiring so hopefully Adobe or someone will release that video to those of us who couldn’t make the trip this year.

One of the things that I’m really going to miss by not getting to go is catching up with all the folks I’ve gotten to know over the last (nearly) 7 years that I’ve been doing ColdFusion work. It’s always neat to see folks that you used to work with and are now in different positions as well as those you see at these conferences year after year.

Working vacation comes to an end

Dan Skaggs — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 16:09:31 +0000

As I mentioned when I started this blog, I’ve taken a new job that requires me to travel to a client’s site each week and am currently working on a project outside Washington, DC. For the last 2 weeks, my wife and 3 kids have been here with me.

My wife homeschools our twin 9-year-old daughters (and most likely will our son, but at 7 months old, he’s not a very good student right now). Homeschooling not only gives grat flexibility in when you do school, but also WHERE you do school. So for the last two weeks, their “schoolhouse” has been relocated up here. As you can imagine, the Washington, DC area is a gold mine in terms of things to see and do and the girls have had an absolute blast going to all the different museums, monuments and attractions around DC. Even the ride on the Metro (subway) here was a treat for them.

One of the highlights for me for this trip was being able to attend the dedication ceremony for the

Career moves -or- Leaves…continued

Dan Skaggs — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 01:46:52 +0000

In my last post I mentioned that I’ve recently changed jobs and am now in a position traveling to client sites as a ColdFusion consultant. Moving away from a full-time position that I’d had for 8 1/2 years wasn’t easy–for my wife and me nor for my 9-year-old twin daughters.

My wife home-schools our kids giving us a very flexible schedule. When we told the girls that they’d be able to come to D.C. with me at some point during the project, they were all for the move. That was 2 weeks before I even started the project. Last week and this week my wife and kids have been here in D.C. with me and have been on a constant field trip to our nation’s capital.

Today, we attended the dedication ceremony for the U.S. Air Force Memorial