A setback on the road to 25K

I've already suffered my first setback: my first big corporate travel has just been postponed, and it's caused me to cancel a mileage run in April that was only going to cost me 3.2 cents.

Luckily, I do most of my personal booking through Orbitz for Business, which the new corporate handbook on travel allows because they have very good negotiated rates. (Better on AA, but we've already discussed how impractical that is out of MCO.) OFB offers courtesy cancellations within 24 hours, and astonishingly I had just booked my ticket from MCO to PDX a few hours before this business travel trip was cancelled. I was to leave for Los Angeles a week from yesterday.

We are charging our vendor for the cancellation fees for all the people who were scheduled to travel to Los Angeles.

So what's the big deal with my mileage run? Well, the trip to LA has not been canceled -- just postponed. And it looks like it's going to be rescheduled for the week of my original mileage run! In the era of $150 change fees on T-class tickets, I would have lost almost the entire value of the $200 MR fare.

Depending on the rules Delta has for canceled tickets on my LAX trip, I might be able to come up with a higher-mileage routing than the MCO-ATL-LAX route. But this is actually Double Suck because I had squeezed into the window for a special Delta promotion for double miles on the ATL-LAX routing. Hello, 4,000 miles! Not MQMs but still. If you can run the route, might be a good way to get some extra miles, even if they're not MQMs. Register on Delta's Web site.

C'est la vie. Life will go on. The beach in SoCal should be better in April anyway.

Why I choose to fly

There are a lot of ways you can get around this country. It's a really big country, and gas is still fairly cheap. Too cheap, probably. (My grandfather, a former petroleum engineer, always says the only thing cheaper by the gallon than gas is water.)

I work in the media industry and I know a lot of people who will drive from one end of Florida to the other or all the way from Florida to New York or Chicago. Many others take the train, put up with the indignities of Amtrak and the motion sickness. Both groups say they want to see this great country.

And the big knock on people who fly is that they bypass everything between the coasts.

But I prefer to fly.

There's just something about that exhilarating feeling about being thousands of feet up in the air. The glamor is pretty much gone from the airline industry — between buying bad dry sandwiches in coach and only chips or cookies in first class, it might as well be Amtrak's diner car — but the fun of being in a new airport, the joy of just strolling through security... nothing better!

And then, well, the view from the window seat. Can't put a price on that!