Thanks everyone for the welcome, thanks mods for the teleportation.And thanks to the Fab 6 for the advice.

Ok..........................

Airports: NY area. Laguardia, Islip, JFK and Newark in descending order of pref.

Prefered Destinations: love travel, go anywhere. Burning desires for Barcelona (been there 19 times as a musician, lots of friends), Lisbon (great city, though fast turning into McEurope), Toronto/Montreal (easy drive, but flying's faster), anything in Asia. San Francisco. London. Belgium (mussels, chocolate, french fries, and beer...it's heaven).Warm places in winter. Cool places in summer. I'd have done that Iceland trip reported in Slate in a red second. Love to travel.

Problem: very very little money. But this didn't stop me from hitting Tokyo two months ago ($350 r/t on AA, thanks to travelocity farewatcher, see, I still have vestiges of studliness left!). But as a musician and a writer, I can often score ways to at least partially pay for trips (gigs and articles). I have the adventurous, impulsive, finagling mindset that would have made me a frequent flyer contender if I'd not sort of fallen apart with all that a decade ago.


tom911: I will indeed go surf the AA board and find out what "platinum challenge to jump start to elite status" means. I seem to be all about AA, so I'll concentrate my efforts there.

shambles: thanks for welcoming me back into the unhealthy world of obsessive compulsion. I'm not fully grokking what you're saying with the Hilton thingee, it's sort of like coming in mid-spiel on the cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs bunny without being acquainted with the cereal. I could definitely use a way to lodge cheap, I do lots of driving road trips (for food...I satisfy cravings with multi hour rides, though I'm strangely not obese). I'll go to hilton's site and see what I can learn.

Much appreciated. Please let me know if the further info above changes anything. Shall I kiss those thousands in monthly expenditures (in my original posting) goodbye? C'mon, you guys. There's no one out there ingenious enough to help turn that into an MMT (major mileage thing) for me?