^^^ Hope you keep posting! -- I'm looking forward to reading this one. Since most of my travel is employer-paid in Y, and I use most of my RDM to fly family members around, I don't really
get the international F experience. But your upcoming travel sounds right up my alley! (My push to 1K this year is only 31K, distributed over 6 weeks... so I'm glad I can point to somebody slightly crazier than me).
Plus, your travelogue style reminds me of the notorious
eightblack and
colonius pear-shaped Thanksgiving MR tales. Not that I'm wishing that on you, but it's fun to read!
LAS is a great MR from my home airport (thanks to exactly the sort of routing rules you mention), so I'm
very happy to hear about the club agent you discovered.
QBK, thanks. I may sound crazy but I was looking at all these runs over the last two months of the year but due to work conflicts and the fact that fares were so much better Dec 1-15 than November I ended up having to do it all in December. I was going to have it all done b/w Dec 1 and 17th but my wife and I decided to go to UNC for the basketball game and that negated the Dec 17th trip and made it a little more "sane".
****
Flight #1: LAS-CLE, UA 772, A319, N815UA, No Ch9
Scheduled: 1130p-625a Actual: 1124p-555a. On-Time, not upgraded (#3 on list)
Flown Miles: 1824 EQMs Running Total: 68059 Delta to 1K: 31941
This flight was uneventful and 100% full. On a side note, according to my flight memory this was the fastest flight of the year. As you could have guessed I slept the whole flight. It is beyond me who is leaving Vegas on a Friday but the extreme cutbacks in the late redeyes and the late LAS-SFO/LAX flights (connecting to their redeyes) probably means that the CLE, IAH and EWR redeyes are all going out full. Ironically this severe cut of late flights from Vegas to LAX/SFO impacted this mileage run. It was originally booked LAS-SFO-IAH-SLC outbound on Nov 27/28. However UA schedule changed the LAS-LAX/SFO flight where the latest flight midweek was at 4 or 5 pm. That is an illegal connection to the IAH redeye. Because of this I was able to actually more the trip from a Tuesday/Wednesday to Friday/Saturday negating the need to take a day off of work.
Following up on my LAS-SFO and SFO-IAH flights it turns out that I would have made the flight into IAH about 1.5 hours late this morning. My LAS-SFO pushed back at 955p and sat on the taxiway for a while arriving in SFO at 1205a. The inbound IAH-SFO 787 (turning to the SFO-IAH redeye) was 3 hours late as well arriving at just after 11p. Turns out that you can’t turn a 787 in 50 minutes, so they didn’t push back until 1a. Perhaps if United would post realistic delays instead of creeping them 10 minutes at a time it’d be more useful. Thankfully for me due to the fact that it looked like a misconnect in the system I was able to get this CLE/ORD routing.
So I’ll just be hanging out here in the lounge for another 45 minutes or so. Looks like I have 1h20m in ORD so I should be able to provide an update there after being on a packed RJ145. Though I’ll keep an eye on the seat map, as of now I am not on the A side of the A/C. As a broad shouldered bigger guy I hate when people are next to me and will do almost anything to avoid it