Wrapping Up the Year of Ultimate Travel

travel collage by lochnessjess
As part of my Annual Review, I count up all the countries I’ve been to and look back at the visits over the year. This time, one thing was clear: I made it to a lot of places in 2008!
For those who are interested, here is the year-end roundup of my adventures, including a few statistics, misadventures, and highlights. For everyone else, enjoy the holiday week and I’ll see you on Monday.
The Country List
In rough order, here’s everywhere I went in 2008:
u.s.a., japan (x2), india, costa rica, chile (easter island), argentina, uruguay, jordan (x2), lebanon, syria, tunisia, italy (x2), germany*, canada, san marino, hong kong (x3), pakistan, singapore, brunei, iraq (kurdistan), poland, bulgaria, austria (x2), korea*, mongolia, romania*, netherlands*, latvia, estonia, finland, russia, moldova, el salvador, panama, egypt, spain*, qatar*, mexico, belize
*Transit only
I traveled by the usual methods: plane, train, bus, ferry, taxi, etc. The difficult parts were the overnight train from Moldova to Romania in the middle of the July heat, feeling confused in Russia since I know less than five words of the language, sleeping in too many airports (see below), and getting tired at a number of places along the way. These challenges were balanced with countless great experiences, as well as the chance to move much closer to my goal of all 194+ countries before 2013.
I like to change things up when I travel, so I visited a broad range of rich, poor, and in-between countries (sometimes referred to as the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world). A lot of significant countries got crossed off the list, including Iraq, Pakistan, Mongolia, and Russia. Yay!
Ufc fight schedule
Domestic
I don’t travel that much within the U.S. and Canada, but I was able to make it to Portland (Oregon), Vancouver, Minneapolis, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Most of those trips were fairly short stops of 24-48 hour layovers in between flights.
Mileage, Elite Status, and Airport Sleeping
Because my travel goals have evolved a few times, I haven’t kept a complete log with each trip and the overall cost so far towards the main goal of visiting every country. By popular demand, I’ll try to do this in 2009 for those who are interested. For 2008, here are a few notes based on airline alliance and other categories.
ONE WORLD - I earned more than 220,000 miles by flying with American Airlines and other OneWorld carriers this year, but a lot of those miles represent additional bonuses. The base mileage I traveled is probably somewhere around 100k, putting me in the highest status level of Executive Platinum.
STAR ALLIANCE ? Aside from a Frequent Flyer award from Seattle to Italy, I flew only about 20,000 miles with United and Star Alliance carriers this year, not enough to earn even the lowest level of elite status with them. Too bad ? but I have an idea that may fix that next year.
SKY TEAM ? Thanks to a status match, I received complimentary Northwest Platinum status for the next two years despite only flying with them once on another free ticket. I find it amusing that I have the highest level of status on an airline I have never spent money with. Hopefully the status will shift over to Delta as soon as their merger is complete, and that will help me with some Air France / KLM flights I’d like to take late in 2009.
AIRPORT SLEEPING - I slept in airports at least five times ? in Dallas once, in Singapore twice, and in Rome twice. The second time in Rome was particularly miserable. I didn’t write about it at the time because I felt truly awful and had a very bad travel day. At 5:00 a.m. I got myself off the floor and summoned up my best powers of gratefulness. Anyway, it’s over now and at least I didn’t give up.
OTHER AIRLINES ? In addition to more than 10 of the legacy carriers (Lufthansa, Cathay Pacific, etc.) in the main airline alliances, I also traveled on JetStar Asia (Malaysia), TAROM (Romania), SilkAir (Singapore), Korean Airlines, Jet (India), Kingfisher (India), and Air Moldova — with the last one winning the prize for most random airline.
Global Misadventures
I never go looking for trouble, but sometimes I do run into it. In Mongolia I was evicted from my guesthouse
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