When I first started flying frequently, I didn’t have any particular goals in mind. I vaguely wanted to visit places I hadn’t been before, but I had nothing that I could hold myself to. Once I got my Flight Log up and running, though, I had a much larger set of information about how I’d flown in my travels, and that allowed me to make my goals much more concrete.
My goal is to fly through 100 different airports. At the time of this writing, I’ve visited 42.
Visiting my 42nd airport (GRK), and I knew where my towel was.
This will be a challenging goal to meet; I’ve already picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit by taking layovers in different hubs. My travel is largely within the United States, and looking at the FAA’s 2012 enplanement stats, I’ve been to 23 of the 29 large hubs in the US—I’m only missing Houston Bush (IAH), Miami (MIA), Fort Lauderdale (FLL), Chicago Midway (MDW), San Diego (SAN), and Tampa (TPA).1 My home airport of Dayton doesn’t serve any of these airports, so I’d have to fly out of Columbus or Cincinnati, making them a little harder to pick up as layovers. Also, particularly for MIA, FLL, and TPA, there aren’t many reasons for me to have a layover in Florida on domestic travel from Ohio, so I’d probably only pick them up as a layover on a multi-city itinerary.
So a lot of my remaining airports will have to come as destinations. This is a long term goal.