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Entries in Business Travel (3)

Monday
Mar102014

Moving on...

Wow, I can't believe I let this narrative stagnate for a whole year.  Life is busy.  And then it's not... or at least you think it might not be.

I was recently canned from my employer of 9 years because they're restructuring where the work is done.  Old story, even for me.  However, before my last day there, I and a number of teammates got a renewed lease on life, working for the company in a different product area.  It's a good opportunity for us in a number of ways, so I'm still "there", but it's all new.

As part of moving to this new role, I'm also temporarily working in a different city, far from my family, friends, and bandmates.  An opportunity to explore places, technologies and musical inspiration, and hopefully to spend a bit more time with family who live closer to my new temporary home than to my permanent one.

The new location is Montreal, which is somewhere I worked for more than a year a long long time ago, before I moved to Vancouver. As a fitting first dinner last evening, I had Montreal smoked meat, which was excellent. Montreal is an interesting, ethnicly diverse city, and I'm looking forward to lots of great meals.

I also hope I can find my way around the local music scene, as I also think of Montreal as vibrant in that area. And meanwhile, back in my "bachelor pad", I have a minimal setup for making music, and hope I can make it work well for me.

I've written previously about how I find business travel both frustrating and inspiring.  I expect this experience will be no different, but am looking forward to the inspiring part... there's a LOT of possibilty there. For the rest... hopefully FaceTime will help keep family close.

Tuesday
Jun262012

Traveling or Voyaging?

Today I'm on a business trip to California.  I actually haven't traveled nearly as much this year as I have for the past few, which is nice.  Anyway, business trips for me are rarely too much fun on their own.  I've written about these issues in a past post.  I always try to find a little time for myself, though, and do something I enjoy.  Interestingly, I find that simpler when I'm not traveling with others, as they generally tend to do the standard dinner and drinks and off to bed routine.

It was a beautiful day in Silicon Valley [as is nearly every day of the year], and this was the view out my hotel window at 7pm, looking south across the whole valley:

Anyway, today I found myself in informal travel mode, and coincidentally wearing a traveler shirt:

Perhaps this was a subliminal message to me, as when I found myself alone at dinnertime I felt the urge to travel further, rather than go visit a guitar store or similar, which is my tendency when I'm here.  This urge to travel, particularly to the ocean, is a common theme when I travel.

So tonight, from San Jose, I drove west to visit one of my favourite spots: Santa Cruz.  It's actually only about 40 miles away, but with the crossing of a mountain range and moving from semi-desert to coastal weather, it seems like another world.  Unfortunately, I didn't factor in that there are fewer hours of sunlight here in Northern California than 1000km to the north in Vancouver.  I left San Jose at 7:30pm, and the sun had already set when I arrived on the coast.

I had visited Santa Cruz a few times in the past.  My first visit in 1995 involved arriving on a sailboat after sailing 7 days nonstop from the mouth of Juan de Fuca Strait at the north tip of Washington state.  Needlesstosay the warm, dry port of Santa Cruz left an indelible positive impression on me.  On that visit, I had a chance to walk around various parts of town, as the harbour is pretty central.

And I have stolen a few quick evening visits over there when in San Jose on business, including at least one very enjoyable evening with a variety of business associates.  I had never visited the Lighthouse Field State Park area, southwest of the town pier.  So that was my initial objective for this evening, and it didn't disappoint.  Although the sun was down, the twilight colours were pretty, and the silhouettes of windblown pine trees gave the entire scene a poetry I wasn't expecting.

I thoroughly enjoyed walking around the area, observing the slow swell and occasional surf breaking on the sandy shore, the undulating kelp beds, and my favourite brown pelicans gliding effortlessly above the waves.

I even put off dinner in order enjoy as much of this lovely environment as I could take in.  I found myself cursing the fact that I had not brought a good camera with me.  I took quite a few pictures on my iPhone 4, but they tend to be pretty poor, paricularly in lower light.  I think they've captured the moment, though.

As I left the area, I drove a bit further up the coast, and then decided I've always wanted to see Halfmoon Bay, so why not carry on the adventure a bit further.  Of course the evening was getting pretty dark by this point, and Halfmoon Bay was well over 40 miles north of Santa Cruz.  But once beside the great ocean, I found myself reluctant to pull away so quickly.  So off I set, into the relative unknown.  I had actually driven this section of road once before on a Saturday off during a business trip.  Cruising up the dim strip of pavement was just familiar enough to be enjoyable.  This section of Highway 1 isn't overly twisty, so it was quite good driving despite the hour.  And of course I had lucked into a clear day on the coast... it's often foggy along this strip.

As I drove up the highway, I found myself musing about the difference between traveling and voyaging.  To me, a voyage involves discovery and new experiences.  As a business traveler, I have long abandoned that sort of feeling when it comes to basic business travel.  I equate travel with sitting in airports, sitting on planes, sitting in meeting rooms... lots of sitting.  But I do often find tastes of voyaging wherever I go, if I can just manage a few hours to explore.  Sometimes, like tonight, it's a solo jaunt up some unfamiliar coast in a rental car.  I've done it from Boston up past Salem, and from Tampa, Florida out to see Cape Canaveral.  Or a crazy drive across Europe last September when I had a few days free between meetings and tore from Genoa, Italy up to Stockholm, Sweden... and then back at the end of the week.

But equally fascinating have been the more urban voyages.  The narrow alleyways of old Genoa.  The cobblestone streets of Copenhagen.  Discovering pubs with good mates in Soho... both London and Manhattan.

Interestingly, my voyage tonight included arriving at Half Moon Bay to find that I was unable to locate the harbour I saw earlier from the air, when looking in the dark on the ground.  Perhaps a failure to achieve one of today's objectives, but also an opportunity to bring myself there again, perhaps in another context.  And in daylight.

If you find yourself traveling... have a little look to see if you can locate the voyage in your travels.  It makes for a more fulfilling trip.

Cheers

Dave

Sunday
Jun122011

Mid-Atlantic Blues

I posted some reviews last time I was flying across the Atlantic. I figure I have nothing better to do, so here are a few thoughts about travel.

 

Now don't get me wrong here. I really enjoy traveling in general. Seeing new places, and even [eek] meeting new people is really great.

I have done some great personal trips in my life. Driving around Nova Scotia with my now-wife. Motorcycling from Vancouver to Ottawa and back in two weeks. Visiting parts of Australia including a week-long motorcycle tour. Bancock, Thailand. Even Hong Kong, though I could barely stand the noise level. And my greatest trip, which was a year-long voyage, mostly by sailboat, from Vancouver down the coast to Mexico and eventually through French Polynesia to Tahiti.

 

And I've seen a lot of cool things and driven more rental car models than I can count on the numerous business trips I have made over the years. I've stayed in a few very nice hotels, and have definitely eaten a lot of great food.

But my pet peeve of the day is the huge number of comments I get from people about how great it must be to be traveling on business trips. Let me set the record straight.

For many of us who travel for work, it means:

- Being away from our families. My little one cries when I tell her I'm going away on yet another trip. My wife lives the life of a single parent while I'm gone, and is exhausted when I get home. And sometimes we miss important events because of travel. I doubt I'll get to see the Stanley Cup final this week, even though the home town team is playing [go Camucks!].

- Getting up at ungodly times to rush to some airport where we get treated like cattle on the way to slaughter. Oh and perhaps being exposed to unsafe amounts of radiation in the body scanners and in the air.

- Spending the vast majority of our time locked away inside a building or vehicle. For me it's normally many hours of meetings followed typically by a decent dinner and then hours of work to catch up with whatever happened in the office during the day and to prepare for whatever meeting is happening the next day.

And it's still surprisingly hard to find Internet access on the go without paying enormous sums for the privilege. So lots of waiting around. And it's often a stretch to get decent exercise on the go.

Sure, it really is awesome to travel to Northern California or Italy. I love the palm trees. The blue sky in CA. The mega-yachts on the Riviera. But I tend to see them only from a passing car, or after dark. On the other hand, it would be great to spend the weekend sailing with my family instead of touring airports and wearing out my butt in airplane seats.

So next time you think it sounds cool for someone to travel so much, perhaps you could inquire how they like it, rather than assuming it's great. Oh, and i dont travel nearly as much as many people I know. I'm not sure how they do it, frankly.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant. It's not. I'm inspired by constantly optimistic and grateful people in my life to look at the great things I have to be thankful for. An there are many.

And you're among them, so: thank you!