The Gold Standard

I have decided that it's necessary for me to become a Gold passenger on American Airlines. This is somewhat difficult because I can't always fly AA out of Columbus the way I could in St. Louis. But there's a special line that allows you get through security faster, you accumulate miles quicker, etc.

I need to rack up 29 flight segments between now and the end of the year to qualify for Gold status. I will earn 4 segments on Saturday.

Since April is at work all day, I decided to try to find a cheap way to rack up some miles and segments. I did a search for flights within 90 miles of NYC and sorted by fare. The cheapest one was about $120. This flight takes me to Philadelphia (via St. Louis) in the morning and back to Columbus (via Chicago) in the evening.

I'm going to bring along a bunch of magazines.

Rock and a hard place

As anyone who knows me is acutely aware, I don't support spending tax dollars on corporate bailouts. In fact, I don't support taxes in general.

Northwest Airlines today added fuel to my "so incompetent that giving them tax dollars is criminal" argument. I flew from Memphis to Tri-Cities airport today on a plane that seats 34 passengers. On board the plane were nine of us. The picture above was taken when we hit cruising altitude. I was in row 7. As you can see, there was one person in front of me.

This flight never should have taken off with 74% of the seats empty. Seriously, they couldn't have advertised $100 fares someplace to fill the plane up? Ridiculous.

On the other hand, if they had cancelled the flight, I probably would be just as furious with the airline.

Three pints= drunk Ryan

2.5 on empt y stocmach.

Ate turtle. Like fish basically.

Now wiht Starbuckks. Yum.