36,000 miles later, many headaches, a lot of drama following fortunes made and lost, I’ve returned to these United States. The voyage began in July 2014 and today, the 17th of January 2015, I’m taking a few days to catch my breath before I’m back at it again.

Hopefully the a-live posts over the last month have been entertaining as I chronicled my exodus from Mongolia. I now return to my regular blogging of Trip Reports from my laptop instead of the trusty Blackberry. Obviously I plan on doing much more than redundant posts about first-class showers that but it will be nice to catch up on and relive this latest adventure.

Here is the routing and map of my travels from when this all began:

I’ve been trying to sell Global Entry to all my international travel friends. For $200 you get 5 years of skipping the immigration counter and coming back to the United States free of hassle.

The question I always received was “how do they know you’re not bringing in drugs,” if u skip the desk? The answer is supposed to be because you went through the background screening and interview process making you a trusted traveler.

Today I found out that trust must be earned beyond applying and being approved for the program. After 14 hours in Cathay first, I approached the Global Entry machine, swiped my passport, and took my picture.

With no bags checked I was ready to smell the smells of America for the first time in half a year. Instead, I was told that I was randomly selected for screening.

Randomly selected? What’s the point of Global Entry if I’m just as randomly selected to go through extra security checks as I was before I applied for the program?

The check took only a few seconds as I joked the agent that this was my first time using the system and I wanted a refund for what feels like the old days where I was always randomly selected.

Anyone else have this happen?

So here’s a quick alive post and flight review.

Cathay Pacific first class is awesome. 14 hours of Krug champagne.

Bye bye.