I was seriously on the move in 2024. Between my job at Shopify and a few personal and family trips, I flew 166,672 miles on regularly scheduled flights across six airlines with a total time in the air of 369 hours. That's more than 15 days! It’s a damn good thing I love to fly, can spend hours looking out the window at the clouds, and love having the time to myself. But still, I think it was one of the busiest travel years of my life and I was really happy when I was done with the last flight of the year.

The newest aircraft I flew on was a brand-new Lufthansa A350-900 named “Leipzig” with the new Allegris cabin, which I flew on twice between Munich and Toronto. The new cabin was a treat and a real step up over their older cabins. On the other end of the spectrum, the oldest aircraft I flew on was a 31 year old Lufthansa A320-200 named “Eisenach” between Frankfurt and Thessaloniki.

The longest flight I was on was 13 hours between Istanbul and Houston. The shortest was just 37 minutes between Athens and Thessaloniki. I lost 24 hours to delays with 58% of my flights arriving late. The average delay was 32 minutes, and the longest was 2 and a half hours. Extra time in airports is never my idea of a fun time, but I try to make the best of it with people watching or an excuse to read a bit more of whatever book I’ve got my nose into. It’s more productive than losing my shit over something that I can’t control.

I didn’t get to any new countries this year, but I did make it to Maui for the first time in a very long time and added Nashville (BNA) and Chania, Crete (CHQ) to my list of airports. I also got to spend quite a bit of time in New York City, which is always a treat.

Looking forward into 2025, I’m sure that the travels will continue, although I hope that I don’t travel quite as much as I did in 2024. On the other hand, I do want to make it to some new destinations. Iceland remains tops of my wish list. Most of all, I want to spend more time with friends I haven’t seen in a while.