With my flight from Fargo to Minneapolis, I became a Delta Silver Medallion member. That’s 25,000 MQM sky miles, which roughly translate into miles flown. The true distance flown is probably closer to about 20,000 because of bonus MQMs, minimum mileage credits, and flying non-Delta airlines. If you add that to the airline travel I did at the beginning of the year (Atlanta to LA to Taipei to Hong Kong; Lasa to Beijing; Tallinn to Brussels to Washington, DC to Atlanta >15,000), that’s over 35,000 miles of air travel. Including my train travel (Hong Kong to Guanzhou to Guilin to Nanning to Kunming to Chengdu to Xi’an to Lasa; Beijing to Irkutsk to Ykaterinburg to Moscow to St. Petersburg to Pskov to Riga >8,500) and driving (I estimate at least 7,500), that’s over 50,000 miles.

To give you an idea of the scale of that distance, the circumference of the Earth is less than 25,000 miles at the equator. That’s more than some people will travel in a lifetime. I’d estimate that it is about one-quarter of the distance I’ve traveled before this year (~75,000 miles on my trips to Europe, at least 60,000 driving and at least 40,000 flying in North America; about 18,000 to Australia and back). So let’s put my total lifetime travel distance somewhere around 250,000 miles. That’s a hell of a lot.

But consider the airline “Million Miler” programs that have about 250,000 members. I can hardly imagine hitting that mark. I’m not sure I want to. At that point, traveling would be my entire job. Not unlike airline pilots who might be the ones with the most miles under their belt. Consider a trans-Pacific round trip might garner 25,000 miles. If a crew makes just one of those a week, they’d be at 1,250,000 miles a year. I would imagine that 10 years of that routine would be common for those crews. And 20 would be imaginable. That’s 25 million miles flown and is 100 times more than I have traveled. Now that is truly impressive.