I'd been collecting Skymiles since I was in college and finally blew them all on a roundtrip business class ticket to Australia on VA. Melbourne was such a wonderful experience and I got to see SYD for NYE. More significantly, I spent about two weeks hiking on the beautiful south island of New Zealand.

It took me months of searching to get the outbound LAX-BNE flight booked. I could only ever find terrible routes home - e.g. SYD-PVG-CDG-USA - which I booked anyway. Sure enough, while on the trip and 3-4 days prior to coming home, SYD-LAX opened up (whew!). That's also when I knew I belong on FT.com