I just returned from a week traveling on the Mainland, and through deft planning and use of the high technology of online flight scheduling, I figure I ended up flying roughly 85,000 miles and inadvertently landing in at least three unnecessary states. (The states aren't unnecessary, just stopping there was.)

The purpose of the trip was to pursue a possible employment opportunity which necessitated visiting Arizona and Tennessee. If the opportunity comes to fruition, it will allow me to work in Hawai'i and continue freelancing pieces like this one here and others in local magazines. But in the meantime, I had to place my body physically in the above-mentioned states, which is quite a stretch for me, considering I don't even like to leave my ZIP code. So I booked my trip on Travelocity, paying more attention to the cost of the flights than where they actually went. As a result, I visited Utah on my way to Arizona. And instead of a straight flight from Arizona to Nashville (which is possible), I contrived to book myself on a flight that took me — and I'm not kidding here — to Minneapolis, Detroit, and THEN Nashville.

I'm lucky I wasn't trying to get to Florida or I might have ended up going through Quebec. I was stuck in Detroit for a few hours because the plane I was supposed to go on was broken and they had to fix it. Luckily, they put us on a plane that had actually been flying that day. I don't like flying on planes that have broken down and been repaired. ("OK! The plane's all fixed! Everyone on board! Let's give it a shot!")

I cleverly booked my departure flight from Nashville at 5:30 in the morning, which meant I'd have to take a taxi from the hotel at 4 a.m. How bright was that? I put in a wakeup call request at the front desk for 4 and tried to get some sleep. At 3:45 a.m., a drunk woman decided to pound on my door. Seriously. Then she started pounding on all the doors on the floor and yelling for her boyfriend. I opened the door in my underwear and yelled "Knock it off." It was not a pretty sight: me in my undies and her swaying there in the hallway with a foot-long cocktail, looking like she'd just seen a heavyset man in his underwear yelling "Knock it off."

I was going to report her to the front desk guy, but then I thought, hey, I've never been in Nashville before. Maybe this is the way Nashville hotels handle wakeup calls. They send a drunk woman to pound on your door. (Pound! Pound! "Hey, mishter! Wake up!" Pound! Pound! "Where'sh my tip?") I dragged my bags out to the front of the hotel just in time to see the woman and her boyfriend, yelling at each other, climb into a mile-long Humvee limo and drive away into the sunrise. I guess being a drunk wakeup call person pays pretty good.

I was headed for Las Vegas, which meant I had to go to Atlanta first. Why? Who knows. Luckily, that plane was broken, too, and instead they put me on a plane that went to, and I'm not kidding, Cincinnati. I think they call this the "pinball machine school of flight management."

After Vegas, I was fully prepared to fly back to Hawai'i via Santiago, Chile, but instead only stopped in Los Angeles. That's too bad. A few million more flying miles and I could have gotten a free trip to New Jersey.