First things first, thanks to everyone who visited the blog yesterday! It was my busiest day yet! Keep visiting, forwarding, sharing, or whatever.
I think I’ve alluded to it here before, but my +1 for life XFE is a mileage whore. As in, he will do just about anything for airline miles. Or hotel points. Just as some people have hobbies like scrapbooking or whatever, XFE’s hobby is finding and accumulating points and miles. He works like Lindsay Lohan trying to stay out of jail to get his points.
This is truly phenomenal for me becaue I am usually the beneficiary of his schemes. We go to lots of awesome, far-flung places, in part, so he can keep his status on United. We stay in very lovely Starwood and Hilton Hotels, so we can rack up free nights at one of their resort properties. (We’re also pretty crazy about hotels in general, but especially boutique hotels. In fact, our bedroom looks like a Kimpton, which may or may not have been our point.)
Status on United is pretty awesome. We get upgrades, no bag fees, priority boarding. It’s the best. And we work very hard to keep our status – we use United credit cards, we always choose them for flights, we fly to Turkey for a long weekend (Jan. 2012!), we follow them on Twitter.
Even I recently got in on the game, recently signing up for my first credit card in years because you got 30,000 Continental miles for signing up. In caseyou didn’t know, Continental and United are about to merge, so all those miles will work on United.
But this guy? This guy is amazing. He’s the standard to which XFE aspires. In fact, I’ve coined a new phrase around our house: The Stuker Standard. Check this guy out: 10 million miles on United! Amazing! And he did it this past Saturday, in Chicago, WHERE WE WERE FOR A WEDDING! Crazy coincidence. I don’t know how many miles we have (we just used up 360,ooo of them for first class tickets to Australia next March), but I don’t think we’re even in the millions. We’ve got our work cut out for us if we’re going to meet the Stuker Standard.
My favorite interview with him was on NPR, because of this part about traveling with his wife:
STUKER: Fifteen years. Actually, she’s flown a million and a half miles with me at the same time. But pretty much all on honeymoons.
SIMON: Aww. Aww, you take more than one honeymoon it sounds like, right?
STUKER: Actually, we take about four or five a year. I figure, you know, if we focus on the honeymoon more, you know, then the relationship works out just fine.
See? Cute, right? And that’s how my permanent travel companion and I feel about our relationship. We’re just honeymooning through life.
Oh, another love my remote-control-master -for-eternity and I share is Project Runway. And espcially Season Four winner Christian Siriano. Well, XFE might like it especially because of Heidi Klum, but Christian was my favorite competitor of all time. I picked him straight out of the gate that season and he didn’t let me down. So when this happened at work today, it did not suck (sorry for everyone who’s already seen this via my facebook, twitter and even direct messaging in a few cases).
Did anyone else meet any small, famous people today? Who else knows about mileage runs? What about mattress runs? Where did you go/would you like to go on your honeymoon?
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