The Numbers Game
Extreme travel doesn’t have to mean jumping out of airplanes or rafting down rapids. For some local adventurers, it means obsessively racking up the miles, peaks, or passport pages.
By Tiffany Hawk
Mile High
When John Nguyen of Irvine planned a trip to Dublin, it went like this – LAX to Miami to Washington Reagan to Chicago to Dublin. And the return – Dublin to Chicago to Indianapolis back to Chicago then to Raleigh Durham, Miami and finally LAX.
The route? To earn miles on American Airlines.
The trip to Dublin? To earn miles on American Airlines.
Nguyen is a mileage runner. He takes trips solely to bolster his American AAdvantage account. “If I want to go to Vegas, I’ll fly from San Diego to L.A. and then Vegas,” he says. Although he’s been a member of the program since his first international trip in 1981, and he paid his college tuition – at USC – with an American Airlines’ credit card, he only started running for miles eight months ago. Since then, he’s earned an additional 170,000. And we’re not talking bonus miles, the kind you get from credit cards or hotel promotions. These are elite qualifying miles, the kind you only earn by time in the air on what runners call “American metal.”
For every airline that has an incentive program, there are people like Nguyen who squeeze legs into their itineraries, log onto their mileage accounts daily, take trips for no reason other than point accrual, and compete with others, and themselves, to reach ever higher levels of status. Free tickets are only part of the picture. Status means cabin upgrades, airline lounge access, express security lines, and priority boarding, seating, meal choice and rebooking during irregular ops. Those who reach the highest levels of membership even get a private reservations number where representatives who know their names and preferences give them special attention. At American, Executive Platinum members can choose to work with only one representative (called an AAngel), who will call them back if they’re not available. If asked, these dedicated agents even help a mileage runner design the most indirect routes. “I’m not at that level yet, so I still have to call reservations. Sometimes the rep doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do or can’t find a way to do it, so I just hang up and call back for another person,” says Nguyen who hopes to reach Executive Platinum soon. To finance this lifestyle while keeping a flexible schedule that allows for frequent travel, he works for himself part time as a lawyer and at Saddleback and Rio Hondo colleges as a political science instructor.
“My friends think I’m insane,” he says. “But when they need to find a cheap flight or use a free ticket, I’m the first one they call.” Whether it’s helping others plan itineraries, searching for cheap fares, following trends in the airline industry or posting comments on Flyertalk, a popular message board for frequent flyers, Nguyen is crazy about miles.
But he insists he isn’t a hard-core mileage junky. “Those guys would fly to Ireland and only stay for three hours. Since I’m there, I would stay for three days. For me, it’s a hobby. It’s not yet an obsession. I don’t think it is. Well, it’s borderline.”
Country Club
Pamela Barrus collects stamps. Passport stamps. And she’s collected them from nearly 200 countries. The Laguna Beach native is on the board of the exclusive Traveler’s Century Club, an international organization based in Los Angeles with only one membership requirement: a visit to at least 100 countries.
Country collectors from around the world meet four times a year to discuss what to add (East Timor, Kosovo) or retire (East Germany) from “The List,” the club’s evolving checklist of 315 places, not all of which are countries. French Polynesia, for example, is part of France but clearly warrants a separate visit. When a place on the list becomes accessible to tourists, club members flock there upon announcement. Recently, a handful of members have entered North Korea due to relaxing regulations, bypassing the previous controversial way of completing a trip – visiting the Demilitarized Zone and passing around the back of an official’s table, which “technically” belonged to North Korea. Although Barrus hasn’t made plans to visit Pyongyang anytime soon, she has seen many countries at the dawn of their tourist age like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, and she hopes to visit Libya soon.
“For me the list is great. It gets me to places I just wouldn’t have thought of without it. Like SRPSKA, a Serbian enclave in Bosnia that we added a few years ago, or St. Pierre and Miquelon, an old French territory off the coast of Newfoundland,” she says. “One of the best trips was taking a cargo ship from the Canaries to the last remaining outposts of the British Empire in the Atlantic like Tristan de Cunha and Ascension Island.”
For Barrus, the travel bug is a way of life, but it never bit her. She was born with it. Her earliest memories are of playing with maps as a toddler and sticking state stamps in a booklet as she rode with her parents on cross country trips to visit family. She convinced her parents to wake her up in the middle of the night if they crossed a state line so she could add it to the book. Then when she was 19, she took her first solo trip and ran off to Mexico. Alone. She traveled by bus to Mazatlan where she stayed for 10 days. “Then when I got my degree, it was like an elastic band had been stretched as far as it could and it just popped. I left immediately for Europe.” Alone again and without a plan, she flew Icelandic Air to Luxembourg and just kept going. Five months later, she had circled the globe. “I didn’t know where I was going or for how long. I was just so excited when I would get to one country, I’d think ‘Oh, the next one is so close I might as well go,’ and I made my way all the way around the world like this. I liked it so much, I did it again the next year.” Then around 20 years ago, she heard about the Traveler’s Century Club, and realizing she wasn’t that far from 100, she flew to Eastern Europe and rushed through seven countries to qualify. But as a rule, she likes to stay a bit longer – three months each in Tunisia and Spain, a year and a half in Chile. “Some people are purely country collectors. They fly there, put their big toe in a country and say they’ve been there. But that’s not travel to me. It’s like collecting spoons.”
By tutoring, leading tours and writing guidebooks, all while living extremely frugally, Barrus is able to maximize her time off. This summer, she will walk the Camino de Santiago, a 470-mile pilgrim’s route through France and Spain, and 35 years after starting this game, she’ll still do it with a backpack. “I live cheaply so I can travel. I may not own a couch, but I’ll be the most interesting person in the rest home.”
Summit Up
Ever bag a peak? Patty Rambert has. In fact, the Laguna Niguel grandmother devoted the last five years of her life to peak bagging, a term climbers use for reaching the summit of every mountain on a list. In Rambert’s case, it’s the Sierra Club’s Sierra Peaks Section (SPS) List, a compilation of 247 mountains over 6,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada range. At last count, she’d completed 206, but she’s racking them up, and fast, by climbing an average of 200 days a year. Pretty good for a 57-year-old who also spends her time canyoneering, cross country skiing, spinning, and practicing yoga.
“The list just gives me a reason to keep in shape. And it’s a great challenge. It takes you from Ridgecrest past Lake Tahoe to places you may not have gone to without it.” The only drawback, she says, is that she is driven to climb only new peaks, which keeps her from revisiting special places. “I don’t repeat. Some people say ‘Patty, you can’t remember which trip was which,’ and they’re a little bit right.”
To bag as many peaks as she can as quickly as she can, Rambert takes seven to 10 day backpacking trips where she camps at the base of a range, wakes up early and summits one peak then returns to base for some sleep before doing it all again the next day on another nearby mountain. On a seven-day trip, she’ll reach the top of five mountains. With a day and a half hike in and out, that’s a peak a day. Most people only do three, taking rest days in between. But not Rambert, she’s determined, and that’s how she checks off more than 40 peaks a year.
“Last year, I realized this wasn’t just a hobby. It’s an addictive behavior. My list was dwindling, and I had to work harder to get the peaks that were left. But I’m going to be a little more cautious this year.” Her determination has lead to a few close encounters with weather. “Lightening can be scary. You hear the crackling, and your hair stands on end, you can feel the electricity through your walking stick. Once, we could feel all that but could see the summit register, so we threw down our poles and packs and ran up, signed our names as fast as we could, slammed down the book and got out of there. We shouldn’t have done it.” The thrill of reaching the aluminum box with a registry of the climbers who’ve reached the summit, many of which include names of legendary mountaineers like Norman Clyde and Walter Starr, has kept her going in all conditions. Ice climbing with crampons and an ax is old hat for Rambert, but in August of 2005, the cold turned hazardous. Caught in an unexpected blizzard, she presented early signs of hypothermia. She and a climbing partner were descending a snowfield and she couldn’t open her pack. Her partner said he’d have to leave her there in a mylar bivvy bag, but she refused and pressed on. An hour and a half later, they reached safety and she headed home to Orange County, thankful to be alive. But only one week later, she was back out there.
Rambert hopes to complete the SPS list this year along with the Desert Peaks list (she only needs five more of its peaks), and then to keep active, she may join the Highpointers Club, a national organization whose members climb to the highest point of each state. In Florida, it’s Britton Hill, a ripple in surrounding farmland only 345 feet above sea level. In Alaska, it’s Mt. McKinley at 20,320 feet. “Being out there is important. It’s my life really. I love a new challenge.”
