For Sifnos

At Brisbane the air conditioning hits harder than the heat outside. The boarding chime sounds and a woman two rows up folds a paper map of the Cyclades into quarters.

Someone is getting married on Sifnos. Not in Athens, which is where the long flights land, but after Athens. After the long flight and the other flight and the ferry that leaves early and is always late. Which is the point.

A question came in yesterday, precise as these questions get. Brisbane to Athens, around the fifth of September, back around the thirteenth. About eight hundred thousand Membership Rewards, sixty thousand Qantas points, accounts only with Qantas and Virgin. Premium economy if possible. Economy if cheap.

It is easy to read that as logistics. It is not.

No one flies twenty-two hours in premium economy, or economy, for the seat. You fly because someone you love has chosen a white church and a small island where the wind carries the bells down to the port, and they have asked you to be there to hear it.

The arithmetic is seductive. It gives you something to do with your hands while you contemplate the distance. You tell yourself you are optimizing. You are looking at Qatar through Doha, Cathay through Hong Kong, Singapore Airlines through Changi, Emirates through Dubai, Etihad through Abu Dhabi. You are checking Qantas and its partners and Virgin and its partners. You are opening new frequent flyer accounts for airlines you have never flown, which feels faintly disloyal, like making new friends just because they have a boat.

Of course you will have to open new accounts. One for Avios. One for KrisFlyer. The islands require it.

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There are small humiliations built into this particular pilgrimage. Premium economy to Athens barely exists. Airlines like to sell it to London and Paris and Rome, not to the end of the line where the wedding actually is. Reward seats in that cabin are rarer still. You can see them on the map for a moment and then they are gone.

And the other quiet fact: reward tickets do not earn status credits. You cross an ocean and your loyalty balance does not notice. This offends something deep in the frequent flyer brain, which wants its suffering counted.

The better route is rarely the most direct. From Brisbane you will almost certainly go west to go east, or east to go very far west, and you will learn the texture of an airport at 3 a.m. that is not yours. Doha at midnight smells like oud and coffee. Singapore at dawn is too clean to be true. You will have time to consider your choices.

The question asks whether economy is acceptable if cheap. It always is. For a wedding, economy is acceptable. You are not traveling to be comfortable. You are traveling to be there when two people promise things to each other on a small island that most maps have to label with an arrow.

I have watched people get off these flights. They do not look triumphant. They look creased and grateful. They queue for a gyros near Syntagma and then they queue for a boat. Sifnos is another five hours from Piraeus if the Meltemi behaves. It usually does not.

You will have spent eight hundred thousand points, or a fraction of them, or none of them if cash was wiser that week. It will not matter much on the ferry. The wind will be in your face and someone will be saving you a seat for dinner tomorrow.

That is a long way to go for a weekend.

It is exactly the right distance.