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Old May 7, 2011, 6:00 pm
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hulagrrl210
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: SMF, OGG
Programs: UA MM, Alaska Airlines MVP
Posts: 197
MIA Mileage Run

When I booked my trip to South Florida, I figured the last place I would find myself was in the middle of the worst snow storm in a decade.


NOAA Satellite Photo

This one started, like most of them do, right here on flyertalk. I hadn't really thought much about doing a mileage run seeing as how it was only January at the time but when I stumbled across this LAX/SFO-MIA thread my interest peaked.

Usually when I book a trip somewhere and I need the miles, I go visit a friend, a national park, or find some other reason to somehow justify what I am about to do. That, or I hit up the family business for a trip to Hawaii, to surf work over there for a week. Either way, I hadn't done a legitimate run since maybe 1996.

At the time, I figured if I was going to pull this trip off, at least I should come up with a good reason to go to Miami. I do like warm weather and with the unbearably cold winters here in Northern California, that's a good reason...right? I don't know. That sounds kind of lame on second thought and there are lots of places that are warm, like, say, Hawaii. I knew I needed to try harder.

My husband and I had passed through Miami on our first cruise about a year ago, and while I wasn't so thrilled about being on a boat with a couple other thousand people for a week, I was pretty excited about some of the food I discovered once I got back on shore, namely, the Cuban sandwich. I couldn't get enough of them while I was there, right up to the hour we left when I got my final fix from an airport bar. I'd also wanted to get one of those, "I'm in Miami b*tch" t-shirts (you know, like from the song) to wear around at home. Well that didn't happen, and I was really, really sad about it right up until the moment I saw something better...way better. As we walked through security at the airport on the way back, I spotted a guy wearing a "I was in Miami b*tch" shirt. If you think about it, that is a far more accurate statement, because once you leave, you're not actually in Miami anymore, b*tch. That was it, I had to have one.

So now with two reasons to go back to sunny Florida- to get a Cuban sandwich and a profanity laced t-shirt, I looked into booking my ticket. The fares out of SFO were good, about $190 roundtrip. One problem- I don't live in San Francisco. I live in Sacramento, and fares out of there were, well, not good. The deal I'd found was for an ungodly early flight, via Denver, same day turn, and back to SFO the same way by about midnight, plus add at least 2 hours driving each direction. This was beginning to sound like a bad idea and a bad day. The miles weren't spectacular either, as Denver is actually kind of on the way to Florida. I began having second thoughts. However, I don't like giving up easily, so I tried asking my husband if he would be interested in coming along, mostly so that he could drive me down to the city. In an effort to make my motives seem a little less transparent, I tried to temp him with lunch, my treat, in South Beach. He was, as I would assume most loving spouses to mileage-runners are, not that interested. It looked like I was doing this one on my own.

The searching continued, and eventually I found something I liked- SFO-LAX-IAD-MIA-ORD-SFO, red-eye eastbound, returning at a reasonable time the next day, with a SFO-LAX leg thrown in for good luck and the chance to ride a 767 on the transcontinental, vs. a fall less comfortable A319 with fewer first class seats. All this for $264.50 minus a $200 e-certificate I had for being a 1P complaining about something, and I was looking at 6752 miles for less than $65.

So with my first official mileage run in over a decade successfully booked, things were looking up...right up until about two days before my trip when United issued a travel waiver for Chicago. A storm was brewing...

...to be continued

Last edited by hulagrrl210; May 13, 2011 at 4:53 pm
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