Remember when I thought that I recognized the house in the 1959 film The House on Haunted Hill? It turns out that the house is famous for a few reasons. Although it has appeared in a ton of films, including Bladerunner and L.A. Confidential to name but two, I “recognized” it because it looks like the Hollyhock House, which I toured with Sarah and my mom in May 2010. The Hollyhock House and Ennis House, the house from Haunted Hill, were both designed by Frank Lloyd Wright are both sited in Hollywood.

Since seeing House on Haunted Hill, I made visiting Ennis House one of my priorities when visiting Los Angeles. On the day after Christmas, my parents, Sarah, and I drove to the Hollywood Hills to see the house. Regrettably, one cannot tour the house. It was sold to a private owner in July 2011. The house needs a lot of work, but it’s not clear when the house will be open to the public once the new owner takes possession.

Visiting the house is easy with a car. Take Vermont Avenue north past Los Feliz Boulevard. Turn left on Cromwell Ave, then a quick right onto Glendower Ave. Follow the winding road up, up, and up, and then after about a quarter mile you will see the house. Mind the parking signs and take a walk around the house and, obviously, don’t disturb the adjacent properties.

After gawking at Ennis House, we drove back down the hill and stopped at Barnsdall Park to show my dad Hollyhock House because he had not seen it.

A day after we visited the Ennis and Hollyhock Houses, we stumbled on another Frank Lloyd Wright property. This was the Kundert Medical Clinic in San Luis Obispo. Unlike the other two properties, this was still in full operation. It sits along a creek on Santa Rosa Avenue, which was a main road connecting some important towns in San Luis Obispo County. After running around Hollywood looking at two (of many, many) Frank Lloyd Wright homes in Los Angeles, it was nice to find one by accident en route to our next destination.

One of the novel things about this trip was that we took the train instead of driving. We surprised everyone when we told people we met at the inn that we got there by just taking two buses. You can do it, too.

We took the 7:45 AM Pacific Surfliner from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo. The train arrived just before 1:00 PM. We walked to the transit center, which is about five blocks away. If you take Santa Rosa Road, you can see a Frank Lloyd Wright house along the way. We had about an hour layover between our arrival in San Luis Obispo and ate lunch at Luna Red in town.

At the Transit Center, you can take the 12 bus to Morro Bay’s transit center, which takes about 20 minutes. From there, connect to the 13 bus that goes to Los Osos. The stop on Santa Maria Ave and 2nd St stops about two blocks from the inn.

Getting back is just as easy. You have to catch the 11 bus from Los Osos, which becomes the 12 bus and continues to San Luis Obispo. From there, we caught the northbound Coast Starlight. We had about an hour layover and ate lunch in town. Also, if your train is late, you can go to Meze, a wine and cheese shop, that is about a five-minute walk if you follow the rail tracks in the southbound direction.

This was my first time taking this trip with the train, and you can count me as a convert. Yes, the schedules are limited and it takes a lot more time to ride than it does to drive, but I’m on vacation. I’m not in a hurry.

It was supposed to be a pretty straightforward trip to Paducah, Kentucky, originating in Newark with a long connection in Chicago.

We started the day in New York as we do every day, but we had to cross the Hudson River, into New Jersey, for our flight departing Newark. A classic “I-95″ rainstorm, running up the entire eastern seaboard, delayed the incoming aircraft by over two hours. That, in turn, delayed our Continental Airlines flight to Chicago and our long two-hour-plus layover turned into a very risky connection. Although we ran from our arriving gate to the Paducah gate, we missed our United Express flight. We were automatically rebooked on the last flight of the following day, which would put us into Kentucky a full day after than we had planned.

Sarah insisted that we not lose the entire day so we asked if we could be rerouted on a United flight to Nashville, and Sarah’s family would pick us up and drive to Kentucky. The agent promptly rebooked us and issued boarding passes for a flight to Nashville.

The new flight required an overnight stay so we asked if we could get vouchers for a hotel. Since it was the Continental flight that caused the misconnect, we had to ask them for accommodation. Continental doesn’t have much of a presence at O’Hare so it was a bit of a challenge to find someone, but we eventually found someone at the baggage claim office. The Continental agent obliged us and handed us complimentary hotel and meal vouchers. Thanks!

My experience with weather delays and missed connections is pretty limited. It only happened once before, when I flew on a different airline, and I was offered a discounted room, which is an airline’s standard practice. I am fairly certain that because our Newark-Chicago flight was late due to weather, we were not entitled to the hotel and meal vouchers, but I suspect that elite status might have helped in this case.

In either case, Sarah and I made the best of it. We used our meal vouchers for the Tortas Frontera at the B terminal at O’Hare and had one of the best breakfast tortas east of the Colorado River. (Note, if you have one of these $12 vouchers, get a breakfast torta and a coffee.) It also worked out because while we were at O’Hare, a reasonable one-way fare from Chicago to Los Angeles became available. Since I was using some travel credit certificates I received in September for giving up my seat, I had to redeem them in person at the airport. It would have been very difficult to redeem had we not been at O’Hare.

Although it was unfortunate that our plans turned out a bit different from we had originally planned, it helped to keep our cool and ask politely for help. I hope everyone remembers that this holiday season before screaming at an agent.

Today, I transferred some of my United Mileage Plus airline miles to Amtrak Guest Rewards points, even if the two carriers are not partners. However, United’s merger mate, Continental, has been a partner with Amtrak for many years, and beginning this past spring, you can freely transfer miles between your United and Continental accounts.

I converted the air miles to rail points since I find that earning airline miles is far easier than earning train points. For example, almost everyone can earn 5,000 miles by, say, flying on a transcontinental flight between New York and California. Since my elite status with United gives me a 100% mileage bonus on flight, I only need to fly 2,500 miles or a one-way flight between New York and Los Angeles (2,475 miles) or San Francisco (2,585 miles). If you buy a one-way ticket for $175, that’s about 7¢ per mile, or 3.5¢ per mile for me since I have the 100% mileage bonus. (Don’t hate me.)

Comparatively, Amtrak offers a less generous earning rate. You earn points based on the amount of money you spend on travel, not on how far you travel. To earn 5,000 points on Amtrak, you have to spend $2,500, as they will give you two points for every dollar spent. However, Amtrak will also give you a minimum of 100 points for every trip you take. I have exploited this rule a few times in California because you get 100 points for every segment, and that includes short-haul trips on the Pacific Surfliner, which cost as little as $20. At that rate, you can earn 5,000 points in fifty one-way trips. And at $20 per trip, which is a minimum price, that would require at least $1000 to earn the same number of points as $375 on an airline. That’s why I decided to convert my “bling” from air to rail.

One large looming question remains. What do I get with 5,000 Amtrak points?

If you’re going to do the same thing, hurry. The partnership between Continental and Amtrak ends on December 31.

Sure, it was Fake Thanksgiving, and I finally had a chance to shoot skeet. But being a city-slicking Yankee, I felt more comfortable shooting photos.

Maybe next year there will be more guns and less photography.

With my parents joining Sarah and I in Louisville, we wanted to show them one of our favorite places in the River City. The Jockey Silks Bourbon Bar inside of the Galt House Hotel was a favorite of ours when we visited it a few years ago. Not only was it a participating member of the Urban Bourbon Trail, but it also had a magician roaming around the place entertaining guests.

When we went last Friday, we found that bar was not only closed, but it was replaced by a Kaleidoscope Christmas installation. Consider it a mix of site-specific, Christmas art in a family friendly environment. Finding that this had replaced one of our favorite bourbon bars was a true bummer. I hope that this is a seasonal closure for Jockey Silks. Were it permanent, Louisville should mourn the loss of a great, classy institution.

As we prepare for the annual Fake Thanksgiving festivities in Kentucky, it looks like my parents will be joining us. As I write, my mom and dad are en route to Chicago and then on to Kentucky to partake in what I called the greatest idea for having Thanksgiving but without all the headaches.

With my parents coming, this will be the first time that I will be seeing any blood relative for a quasi-Thanksgiving celebration since the Clinton Administration.

With the end of the year is a mere ten weeks away, I’m sure that many potential travelers are looking for airfares to either reach or maintain elite status with an airline or to just get a decent fare for the holidays. Finding a good airfare isn’t as easy as simply going to a travel booking site and sorting by price. That might work sometimes, but if you are flexible with your travel dates and times, as are most people doing mileage runs or booking leisure travel, you can really score a good fare with a bit of work.

What is the Lowest Published Fare?

Update: At the moment, the Fare Compare mileage run tool is not available. I’m leaving the instructions in case the tool returns, but until it does, the site is completely useless and full of SEO tricks to generate page views. Gross!

If I do like it, I then note the fare bucket (the first letter of the fare class) and the airline. Then I look for the fare rules.

What are the Fare Rules?

There are a number of sites that can help you find fare rules. The two sites I’ve used with great success are ExpertFlyer, which is a premium site with very powerful tools, and Wandering Aramean’s Travel Planning Tools. In either case, you want to pore over the fare rules. You should pay attention to:

• is the fare one-way or round-trip?
• if it’s a round-trip fare, what is the minimum or maximum stay?
• what is the advance purchase requirement?
• is the fare valid only on certain days of the week?
• when does the fare expire?
• are there blackout dates?
• does the fare require nonstop travel or are transfers allowed?

If you feel you can live with the restrictions, which the cheapest fares almost always have, then look for flights that meet these requirements.

What Flights Can I Take?

One of the most valuable tools for frequent fliers is ITA Software’s Matrix. The company was recently acquired by Google, and we’re all hoping that they do not get rid of the Matrix because their new Google Flights is almost useless.

You have to use the advanced options to find flights that meet the conditions of the fare.

Note that the “Departing from” and “Destination” fields are pretty straightforward, but the codes below each city/airport need explanation. I used “UA+” to one or more flights on United, but you should use the two-digit code for your airline. The “/F” means to search for flights that meet the following fare conditions. The “BC=G” tells the Matrix to search for flights that are listed with the booking code “G”, but you should use the code that you found with Fare Compare.

Change the dates to what works for you, and begin your search.

It’s possible that the Matrix doesn’t find flights that meet your criteria. If that’s the case, then you should change your dates and search again. It’s also possible that despite the fact that there’s a fare published for your origin and destination (“city pairs”, as they’re called) but flights do not have any seats available in that fare bucket. This is how airlines manage their pricing: they published specific fares, the impose restrictions on those fares, they make available in or withhold seats from certain fare buckets.

Once you find flights that work for you, go to that airline’s site and buy the tickets there. There are lots of advantages to doing that, not the least of which is that the airlines can control the reservation should something go wrong. It’s probably not something you’ll need, but it’ll make things easier should your plans go awry.

Works for Me

I discovered this method about a year ago, while scouring the FlyerTalk message boards and finding a ton of valuable information that travelers have posted on online fora, countless blogs, and a couple of wikis. The “commons” have been a valuable resource for strategies on finding good airfares. Using this method, I was able to book some very inexpensive flights to the Pacific Northwest, including a pure mileage run to Seattle. There’s nothing more satisfying than learning to do something yourself and seeing it actually work.

But if you prefer to skip the research for learning the system, Nicholas Kralev wrote a nice concise explanation to Decoding Air Travel. I probably knew 80% of what was already written here, but had I read this a year ago, I would have saved a lot of time and spared my eyesight some. But I’m a scholar so I am not supposed to fear doing research.

Perhaps it is a bad sign that Sarah and I didn’t get to ride our bikes to Montauk this year, but we are taking our first mileage run this weekend. We will be going to Seattle, by way of Los Angeles, leaving at 7:00 AM on Saturday morning and landing at JFK just 24 hours later.

I upgraded our seats to business class on the westbound JFK-LAX segment so we will have a very comfortable place to sleep and a little breakfast once airborne. Unfortunately, we won’t have the sundae bar, which is one of my favorite parts of flying United’s JFK-LAX/SFO business class service, but we will have an almost lie-flat bed. We have a long layover in Los Angeles on the outbound portion and will be having breakfast with my dad at Pann’s Restaurant near LAX. On the turnaround in Seattle, which begins about three hours after we land in Seattle, we will be having dinner with Sarah’s friend Grace at Thirteen Coins, what Sarah calls an old man restaurant near the Seattle Airport.

The inbound portion of the run will be pretty streamlined with no long connections so there won’t be much time for any more visiting. At best, we will have time to hang out at the club, get a nightcap, board our flight, and get some sleep after a long day and almost 6,900 butt-in-seat miles.

Sarah and I flew to Memphis a week ago to catch Gonerfest 8, a four-day music festival that I’ve wanted to see but never could because either I was too busy during the semester or there were softball playoffs to play. However, this year I let my teammates take care of business in the playoffs (they won in the semi-finals!) and go see some rock music for a change.

The experience was familiar, although I haven’t been to any live show of these bands for many years. There was a lot of people I swear I have seen in the past, maybe even from New York, there was loads of cheap beer, and everyone was dressed in what you would expect at an event like this. There were some surprises, however. There were people, both fans and bands, from as far as Australia. There were a TON of people snapping photos with pretty good SLR cameras, although I didn’t feel like brining in my camera to a night club.

As for the music, I have to admit to have been unfamiliar with most of the specific bands, but I was most impressed by the Straight Arrows, the Gories, the Mean Jeans, Midnight Snaxx, the Outdoorsmen, the Shirks!, the True Sounds of Thunder, Human Eye, the Alarm Clocks, the recently reunited Brides, and Black Sunday. Both bands at the free Sunday Afternoon show, Two Tears and the Jam Messengers, were worthy of playing a full show at any of the other revenue shows.

The city of Memphis seemed to be caught unaware about the scope of this festival, even if remains rather small. No one at our hotel or at the car rental counter knew about it. The cab driver—curiously, we had the same one for the shows on Friday and on Saturday nights—was puzzled about the high number of calls coming for the Hi-Tone, where all of the night shows took place. However, my friend Ives assured me that all the BBQ places ordered extra pork for the occasion.

The constant flow of shows, and the attendant recovery periods, made it hard to see much of Memphis. Sarah and I did get to trek out to Mud Island River Park to see the scale model of the Mississippi River, from the Kentucky Dam to the Gulf of Mexico. You see the bridges that span, the towns that surround, and wade in to the water of Ol’ Man River. It was certainly worth a trip on the monorail to reach Mud Island River Park.

We toured the downtown area on Sunday afternoon, including a detour into the Peabody Hotel to see the famous ducks in the lobby. The most striking building we saw downtown was the abandoned Sterick Building, which caught my eye when I was driving through the downtown region looking for our hotel. I took a few pictures of the building, but none of them do the spectacular building any justice.

We missed a lot of dining options, including the BBQ from Cozy Corner, Payne’s, and a biscuit sandwich from Bryant’s Breakfast. That’ll have to wait until Gonerfest 9, I suppose.