I have a friend whose travels are a mystery to me.

I don’t mean he’s superspy Jason Bourne or anything like that; but rather, it’s the style of his travel I don’t get: he takes literally dozens of trips a year, including at least six to faraway international destinations. None of the trips are very long: he’s got one planned to London next month for a total of four days (this is out of San Francisco, a ten-hour-plus flight to the U.K.). When he discusses his travels, it’s mostly to highlight the business-class upgrades he’s gotten or the uber-cheap fares he’s paid.

At first this raised my hackles, as I thought, oh great, another one. But he’s not the sort who seeks to impress or to give the illusion of pomposity and wealth; au contraire, this guy’s a down-to-earth fellow with a modest studio apartment in Oakland and a job in the public sector. So what gives?

One clue came when he said, “I care more about getting the best fare and the most miles rather than the destination.” He then pointed me in the direction of FlyerTalk.com, a site I’d stumbled across some years back during my days of grueling, weekly, back-and-forth inter-city commuting that makes up the backdrop to Wander the Rainbow. As you loyal readers will note, this wasn’t exactly the high point of my life, getting on a plane every week… so why, I wondered, would someone do this voluntarily — even if it meant weekly jaunts to holiday destinations?

When I looked on FlyerTalk, I discovered my answer: I’m friends with Frequent Flyer Guy.

This persona is no doubt familiar to those who’ve seen Up in the Air, last year’s Oscar-nominated George Clooney vehicle. Clooney plays a professional “corporate downsizer” who flies around the country for work, rarely setting foot in his home base and relishing the allure of the road. When family members fret that it’s an isolating life, he replies — while walking through a crowded airport concourse, natch — “Isolated? I’m surrounded!”

While Clooney’s character does it for work, there’s a growing subset of travelers for whom fares and miles are their lifeblood: they haunt FlyerTalk and other forums, seeking those oddball last-minute super-saver deals and airline hiccups that will cost them next to nothing and earn them maximum miles (routings such as San Francisco-Honolulu-Los Angeles-Denver are not uncommon). To them, the destination is almost incidental, a mere stop on the merry-go-round of airport lounges, premium frequent-flyer status, and first-class sleeper seats. Many of them can be seen, now at year’s-end when many of us are focused on holiday prep, doing “mileage runs” — brief trips that are deliberately long in distance and low in price, for the express purpose of topping off one’s frequent flyer account (premium status on most frequent flyer programs requires flying a minimum number of miles a year).

If there’s one thing my rather unique style of travel (solo gay “flashpacking” around the world) taught me, it’s to avoid judging the way other people embark on journeys. And yet… there’s something about frequent-flyer junkies that leaves me a bit disconcerted. While I applaud any effort made by harried, overworked Americans to get out there and explore other lands, I can’t help but wonder if something’s being lost here. While I do love my perks (I scored some business class upgrades on my world journey thanks to my own now-depleted stash of frequent flyer miles), for me the transformative nature of long-haul travel is what drew me in — and the experiences and insights I garnered overseas held meaning and significance enough for me to codify them into a memoir. While not every journey can be — or need be — so memorable or monumental, I wonder if these miles junkies wouldn’t be better served by journeys longer and more psychically impactful.

But don’t let me be the final word: I’d be interested to hear what you (miles hounds included) have to say. If you’re reading this in an e-mail, please feel free to go to the blog site; if you’re already there, click on the “Comments” just below this entry to have your say.

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