It’s time to take a look back at the travel I’ve done this year. As usual I had a couple of ski trips and one multi-week trip overseas with a couple of long weekends too. First, the visual of my domestic travel:
It’s hard to tell on the map because I hit up the same airports several times but here’s how it worked out:
January
A trip to one of my favorite places, Big Sky, Montana. As usual, finding award seats was a challenge. Add in the fact I had a friend traveling from Memphis with me and another friend in Nashville who wanted to use miles and we decided it was cheaper to take an extra day off work and leave on a Friday rather than buy a ticket to fly on Saturday with the rest of the ski club. Splitting a hotel room made that an obvious choice for us. With American Airlines flying into Bozeman for the first time this ski season, I’m hoping that in the future there will be more award space available than on the Delta flights.
Routing: MEM-DTW-MSP-BZN-MSP-MEM
February
My second ski trip was to Vail, Colorado. I had no problem finding award space on the flight to Denver, which meant I could easily meet up with my ski club there. However their return flight was in the late afternoon and the only DEN-MEM flights with award space were in the morning. So I either had to pay for my own transportation back to Memphis or fly back from the Vail/Eagle County airport (EGE). Even though I had to book ground transportation from our condo to EGE, it was much cheaper than shuttling two hours back to Denver.
Routing: MEM-DEN // EGE-DFW-MEM
April
I took a long weeked to visit friends. One lives in Chicago and the other in Milwaukee. So I flew into Chicago and spent a night there before we drove up to Milwaukee for the rest of the weekend.
Routing: MEM-ORD // MKE-ORD-MEM
August
Another weekend trip out to Denver and my first-ever summertime visit to Vail. I’d originally purchased a MEM-DFW-DEN ticket for Friday night but my flight got cancelled. To get me to Denver as early as possible the next morning I was re-routed via … Charlotte. I didn’t love getting up so early to catch that flight but I did get into Denver on time so for that I’m thankful. A non-stop on Frontier proved to be the cheapest route home.
Routing: MEM-CLT-DEN-MEM
October
My longest trip of the year was a cruise on the Danube River. I hope to start posting about it soon. I flew to Chicago to meet up with my trip roommate and from there we flew to Prague via Brussels. After a couple of days there we took a bus, a train and a taxi to Nuremberg, Germany, where we began our cruise, and floated to Budapest, Hungary. On the return trip I had visions of using my Miles & More miles to stop at Lufthansa’s First Class Terminal in Frankfurt but no award space ever opened up.
Routing: MEM-ORD-BRU-PRG // BUD-FRA-ORD-MEM
Not the most glamorous of travel destinations but I’d never been to any of the European cities that I visited and it was good to go back to some places that feel like home by now.
Next year will bring more new destinations in the form of a trip to Asia as well as going back to some familiar ski resorts.
Where will 2017 take you?
2B Traveling 
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