Up in the Air

Yes, let’s talk about being up in the air, yet again. I’m reminded of it because United showed me my flight statistics in 2017 - and I’m happy they collated all that info for me! The only flights missing are the Singapore Airlines flights where I flew home to Singapore and back, and my Southwest flights to and from Cabo over Christmas. So while United says I’ve flown 4x around the world, it’s really more like 5x around the globe! Here are screenshots of my stats -

I know I’ve been flying a lot - every week actually, between SF and Chicago these days. I was starting to feel burned out with all that flying almost every week for the past 3 years. I know lots of people are envious of my high-flying (no pun intended) lifestyle, and heck yeah even I’m quite envious of me! Collecting all those flight miles, hotel points, credit card points, and essentially getting paid to travel, stay at nice hotels and eat at fancy restaurants...imagine that!

However, having done this for 3 and a half years now, I’m starting to feel drained. I have so many friends in SF and I’ve started building a life and routine so it feels like a home base there - otherwise I just feel like a floating person with no real home. In fact at one point in Denver, I started thinking of my hotel as home - I’d been staying there for a year and a half then and knew the front desk folks well, almost like friends. That was when I was still commuting back and forth between DC-Denver-SF-Denver-DC...I was spending more time in Denver than anywhere else!

Now I’ve built a comfortable and homely life in SF...regular dance classes, volunteering every Saturday, meeting friends, going on dates, etc. I almost wish I didn’t travel as much so I can enjoy more time to myself, in my own place, with my friends or with my date, but then I immediately start missing the travel. It’s like I’m addicted, like I’ve caught the travel bug! I miss taking a plane and having a short (non-existent) commute from the hotel to the client’s during the week, I miss having a per diem so I can spend on food and not worry about it, I miss gaining status with airlines and hotels. What I miss most is having my own room, bathroom and a daily cleaning service so I never - I repeat NEVER - have to do any household chores or cleaning at all! That’s the absolute best part about travel - it’s the ultimate luxurious lifestyle which is great for lazy people like me xD

I almost wish I could live in the lap of luxury all the time; but then I’d just take it for granted. So I guess my ideal situation is if I can continue to travel, but maybe every other week or three weeks out of a month. We’ll see how things go.

On the fun update side - I’ll be going on a wild cross-country trip (flying, not driving) for the next two weeks for site visits with the over 10 folks from the client! It will be a crazy lot of flying (yes more than I already am doing now) - 8 flights to be exact - I’ll hopefully get to know my clients better and learn a lot along the way. Also it doesn’t hurt to gain some miles and get to see Tampa (beaches anyone?), Dallas, and Indianapolis among other cool cities! I’ll be flying SFO-ORF-DEN-ATL-SFO and then SFO-TPA-DFW-IND-SFO.

Here’s my upcoming trip in flight maps:

Wow. That's a total of 13,437 miles in 8 flights in 8 days. Let's keep our fingers crossed that none of these flights get delayed, or at least not enough to miss any of my tight connections! (e.g., that 49min one...)