About Us
In 2020 I was running a Coast Guard Sector and an Air Station on the Columbia River, and I was not allowed to go see any of my people.
COVID had shut the visits down. You cannot lead people you are never in a room with, so I started writing them a weekly email. Not a Commander’s Update. Just what my week had actually been like, and the fact that I was going through the same thing they were.
The emails got away from me. People forwarded them. Folks at units I had never set foot in told me they watched for the emails on Fridays. I had planned exactly none of that, and it woke up something I had let go quiet for nearly twenty years.
Because the resume has it backwards- I was a writer first. That’s right– if Justin can bring sexy back, I can bring the en dash back. Suck it, AI. Anywhoodles, short stories and poetry in high school. Poetry and essays at the Academy, where I won a contest for an analytical essay, of all the things to win a contest for. I kept writing through the career, less and less as the jobs got bigger. I am not a Commander who learned to write; I am a writer who spent 25 years trying to learn how to command.
Why we stopped
My son Henry was heading into the back half of high school, and moving him again was going to cost him something. I was at the point where the next job was somewhere he did not want to be.
He asked me if we could stay put. I told him yes.
So I retired out of Astoria, Oregon, out of an O-6 command, after twenty-five years, most of them in an H-60, surprising nearly everyone, but not myself.
Shana got to the same place on her own timeline, at Northern Command in Colorado Springs, after twenty-two years also flying Coast Guard helicopters.
There is a point when you know you’re done with a career. I knew. I did not want to go any further up, and I was not going to ask Henry to keep moving. Shana felt the same. We put the kids first. Neither one of us have ever once gone back and second-guessed it.
It worked, for whatever that is worth. Henry is a rising senior at the University of Washington. We fly out to Seattle to see him. The last trip was his 21st birthday and he wanted us to take him wine tasting- he has always been a little fancy.
How Shana ended up running the points
Four kids is a great deal of college (the fifth was already married).
We were both working consultancy jobs with a lot of travel, so the bills went on credit cards and the credit cards got paid off with what we were making. The points piled up as a side effect of tuition.
Then we started noticing people using points like that to travel, and travel well. Shana looked at it and said if they can do it, so can I. That is the entire origin story. She is not a person you tell that she cannot do something. Actually, that’s how she got to flying helicopters. After a long day of digging set lines, yeah, she used to be on an Engine crew as a wild land firefighter, she asked a helitack pilot how he became a fire attack pilot. Well, I don’t need to tell you how his response of, “Sweetie, girls can’t fly helicopters,” turned out.
So she dug in, and she got good at it, and somewhere in there it stopped being a chore. She will not pay money for something she could have had free or at a reduced rate, and with that many kids and that many bills she was always going to go that direction. She keeps doing it now because she likes it, and because she genuinely cannot stand watching value go to waste.
What the Coast Guard is doing on this page
It is the before picture.
It shaped us both. It taught us what a decision costs when the consequences are real, and it is where the rigor came from. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
But it is what we did. It is not who we are. A travel site written at you by a retired Captain is not what this is.
So what is this, then
Two things we were already doing, for reasons that had nothing to do with each other, that turned out to be useful to somebody else.
I write. She works the points. Neither of us set out to build an audience, and honestly the last time something I wrote found one, it surprised me too.
How we actually travel
Retired, early fifties, well past the hostel years and nowhere near the luxury crowd. The benchmark is around $275 a night. Comfortable, not excessive.
We take a handful of real trips a year and write down what happened, including the parts that did not work. No tourism board copy. No pretending the elevator was not slow.
Jeremy is at 49 states, Shana at 43. Both of us still circling North Dakota without a compelling reason to land.
Planners by training, we have also booked flights to a city with not one reservation and worked it out after we landed.
Jeremy’s first trip to Europe was at 16. Shana’s was at 47, and she has been building reasons to go back ever since.
Interested in getting more from your points?
Start here if you want to see what that looks like on the page. Work with us if you would rather we just looked at your situation.