At the time this seemed to make a lot of sense.
At the end of December 2004 I realised that I was some 5000 air miles shy of making “Premier Executive” status with United. This was the closest I’ve ever been. The best benefit of being Premier is getting 100% bonus miles for every trip.
So what to do… how do I get 5000 miles? It’s a number game in the end. The most miles, in the shortest time, spending the least amount of money.
So I rang up United customer service and explained my situation and found to me surprise that this is in fact a very common request and the phenomena is called doing a “Mileage Run”.
So the plan was this: Travel on Christmas Day and go from Chicago, to Oakland, to Los Angeles, then to Las Vegas, stay for 5 hours, then head back to Chicago. All within 24hrs.
The idea I had just before I took this stupid trip was to try to document the entire day so I could try to make a movie from it. And thankfully it was the only thing that saved me, since by the end of it, I became completely sick of travelling. Over the course of those 20 hrs, I took over 300 photos with my trusty Nikon D70.
Now, months on, have I got much to show for it?
Fuck all.
But was it worth it?
Hell yeah!
See Mileage Run The Movie here. It’s a 4mb zip file that expands into a Quicktime movie file. The soundtrack was “Run” by Ghostface. I heard it Just minutes before I left the house and it seemed perfect.
