If there was ever a long-term goal, this was it.
He likes to travel. Back in the 1980s he worked for a company that engineered the launch system for cruise missiles. Guess who volunteered to go to California for 3 weeks at a time to test the launch? He got on the plane with two tickets -one for him and one for the disk that contained the system. When the stewardess came around with lunch he ate the disks' meal.
In the next job at an email provider he volunteered to attend standards meetings. These international groups met to consider standards for messaging. The OSI seven layer protocol never made it big, X.400 was the dominant scheme, but that didn't stop him from trips - the Hanover Fair in Germany, Switzerland, Japan.
In the 1990s as consultant he traveled to client sites to solve their messaging problems. Someone in St. Louis sold a unit to a company in Chicago, how should they make the unit, located in Iowa interconnect with the new owner? His partner had a training contract with a group in England - plenty of miles in multiple trips across the pond. It didn't take Dan long to decide that traveling all on one airline was the thing to do.
Not all trips were long, but he made up for it in frequency. Fall and Spring were usually the busy times. One year he was gone every week. He made it to weekend soccer games but missed all the practices. For several years he wrote a column for the trade press Network World. They helped him arrange a multi-city show -Atlanta, Dallas, San Diego, Denver, Chicago - lining up sponsors and then giving speeches. More flying.
We weren't left at home all the time. IBM had a conference in Orlando every January -Lotusphere. Often it coincided with Martin Luther King day, or with a long weekend caused by the end of the children's school semester. We could go down with him, enjoy Disney or Universal Studios and head home leaving Dan to his conference. I've gone to Spain twice in connection with conferences.
It was in Orlando where he and his partner hooked up with The Burton Group. They were located in Salt Lake City, a place that usually requires a connection to reach on United. Dan described Jamie, the owner, as the best writer he'd ever known. After endless meetings with a lawyer about a merger, it was done. They wrangled about stock and shares. The lawyer, in true lawyer fashion telling them, worry less about the stock and more about the money! They continued to worry about both and that paid off later.
The Burton Group had a yearly conference in California each summer. A few years later they added a European conference, Barcelona, Monte Carlo, Prague. Other trade groups popped up - I-4 with a meeting in Montreau Switzerland. I went on that trip and met an interesting group of wives from the Netherlands, France and Germany. They spoke perfect English.
Recently The Gartner Group bought out Burton. They're located in Connecticut, not many miles for meetings. In recent years he's logged miles going to Hong Kong, and recently to India. It's amazing the places that are interested in talking about network architecture.
Towards the end of the year the state of his mileage became an obsession. If it looked like he wasn't going to hit a certain level of miles to assure premium status in the upcoming year then late-year trips could get crazy. One year we went to Kansas for Christmas - Dan flying United from Baltimore to Denver then back to Kansas City; the boys and I on Southwest -which goes non-stop. The idea of flying to Singapore for the weekend to breech a particularly large mileage shortfall was considered, seriously.
The Red Carpet club is important if you're laying over and want to work or relax in a quiet place in an airport. One year he deliberately scheduled a family trip to include a layover in Chicago so he could take us to the Red Carpet club there. Another year we had a non-deliberate layover in Chicago, that almost turned into a Christmas-missed when a flight was cancelled by bad weather and the next flight was full. Three seats remained on the incoming flight and they went to the customer who had Premier Executive status - that was us! Christmas stuck at O'Hare airport wouldn't have been good.
