Travelling

I've been travelling quite a bit for work and vacation lately. Went to Cleveland to do an audit on a company that is going to take our special waste and recycle it. Which would be a lot better than the current practice of landfilling it. I dig it when I can work in some personal goals with the career ones. Nice to see that overlap.

Met up with Uncle Rukes in Cleveland. Rukes is a friend from the past, one of the people I refer to as THE MARQUETTE CREW. I hadn't seen him in probably 11 years - the last time was during one of my infrequent visits to Chicago when I lived in NE Iowa. We had some beers and waxed nostalgic. It was nice.

I drove to Cleveland because the guy from the company had to cancel the original date, and it would have cost double to change the flight. It was only 4.5 hours, so I drove it. Not a real exciting drive.

Then on Monday, I was supposed to fly out of Chicago to Columbus, OH and meet up with 5 other guys from my company to drive to a conference in West Viginny. I had been planning for months to take the South Shore Line into Randolph Station, walk a couple of blocks to the CTA and then take the blue line to O' Hare. Here's a helpful hint for those of you wishing to do this: Make your flight 8:00 a.m. at the latest. Even though I took the earliest train from the Duneland station (4:22 a.m.), I missed my 7:36 flight by minutes. The plane was still hooked up to the tunnel, but they had "closed the door." I tried getting a later flight, but they would have put me in Cleveland or Columbus at 11 p.m. at night, then I would have still had to rent a car and drive another 2 hours.

In hindsight, I probably should have rented a car and then used my ticket for the return trip out of Columbus. I only thought of this once I was back on the train to home. So I drove my car 7.5 hours to West Virginia instead. Did the conference, which consisted of about 3 bad nights of sleep in a strange bed. Went to Columbus with the group, spent another night in a strange bed, actually managed to get about 7 hours of sleep, then drove back to Indiana, went to work for about 4 hours, then came home and drove to Franklin, Kentucky all in the same day.

I figured in the past 2+ weeks, I will have slept in 6 strange beds by the time I get back to Indiana. Good times.