The Art of Tech

This week, I'm in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. Many have called me a brave man for flying to Florida this week. Well, Ft. Walton Beach is in the (more or less) far wester part of the panhandle, so I'm not anywhere near the Hurricanes flying around here.

The thing that is different about this trip is that for the first time, I will not be able to go home for the weekend. So, after a little bit of discussion, my wife and I decided to have her come and spend the second week with me in Florida. I already have the hotel room, I already have a rental car (which she can not drive, but she doesn't want to anyway) and I even have a food allowance. As long as we're smart about watching the food spending, all I have to provide is a plane ride to get her here and back home. Delta AirLines to the rescue.

One advantage of traveling as much as I do is that I have a lot of miles saved up. Heck, I have miles with 6 different airlines that can be used with about 40 airlines worldwide. We used miles to go on our vacation to Australia/New Zealand last December-January. Booking the tickets that way meant that we had to spend a few days in Japan and Guam as well. I only have to pay for the gate fees/taxes for each time we landed somewhere, which was 11 times over 5 weeks for that vacation.

For the ticket I booked tonight, I spent approximately US$70, because there's an extra US$50 charge for booking using miles less than 14 days in advance :(, plus 25,000 miles out of the over 100,000 I currently had. She will leave Friday evening and arrive Saturday morning.

I'm really looking forward to it.