Month: February 2007

I awake in the Windy City this morning, having arrived here late last night and checked into the Palmer House Hilton. It’s funny how a place like Vegas changes your perspective. Normally, I like the historical flavor of a place like the Palmer House, which is 135 years old and heavy on the scenery, particularly in the lobby. But after a few days at the Venetian, all I could think of when I stepped into my room was, This is tiny. In my defense, I think I was influenced primarily by my long ride in the middle seat and secondarily by the extensive plywood hiding the restoration work in the aforementioned lobby, which kind of cooled the impact.

So: down to breakfast, and then home. And then tomorrow: jury duty. Yay.

Leaving Las Vegas today (and yes, that would probably have made a better blog post title). Just wrapped up two days at the Pink Elephant conference at the Venetian. It was an interesting time—a lighter crowd than in past years for this conference, and coming in on Sunday night while the crowd for the NBA All Star game was still in town was a little… chaotic.

Getting out of town has been a little worrisome, too. The rumor coming back to the Venetian was that Southwest had overbooked their outgoing flights by about 40%, resulting in 9-hour-long lines at the ticket counters and a general swamping of the airport on Monday. It was pretty straightforward today, though.

Alas, I’m not going straight home; one more business meeting in Chicago calls. But after that I am back to Boston. Thank goodness.

Oh, and the big disappointment of the conference? No Beatles karaoke.

This morning my coworker and I chipped a half-inch of ice off the rental car and trundled over to our prospective customer’s offices. By mid-afternoon most of the roads were clear, the ice and snow had stopped, the sun was shining, and flights were proceeding out of Columbus.

Except, of course, those flights in the direction of Boston.

Yes, my flight was canceled. Though the weather is OK in Columbus, it’s crappy in Boston so those flights were delayed and canceled. At least I got an early morning flight back, so I can get the driveway shoveled out before business gets started.

I did get lucky in one respect. One of our customers suggested that Easton Town Center was a pretty good place near the airport to stay if I needed to get a hotel room. That tip put me in walking distance of a half dozen places to eat and a bookstore—much better than the airport food options. I even found Leffe Blonde on tap (though admittedly that’s easier than it once was—kudos to their distribution people).

I’m back in sunny Columbus, Ohio for a few days—just in time for a nice winter storm. It snowed all night, fortunately only about a foot accumulation, but it turned into ice about noon today.

This trip has been a lot of work, but so far the actual travel experience has been easier. I got to the hotel about 11 pm, got a good night’s sleep, will get to nap for a bit before dinner… all sorts of good stuff.

My only weather related worry, in fact, is that I have my very nicest wingtips and no other shoes. It’s a good thing Ohio doesn’t salt roads the way Massachusetts does, or the leather would already be totally destroyed.

What can be said about Cleveland, Tennessee? Perhaps its ambassador, the Diplomat Motel, a sagging fleabag of odd smells and rusty plumbing, sitting as it does at the fringe of a used car lot, tells part of the story. But then, any $35 hotel room is probably an unfair representation of the city in which it sits. How about this: less than a mile up the road from the Diplomat is a shopping center with a brand new Starbucks, with wifi and high school kids who joke that slinging coffee for the rest of their lives would be a desirable career—a joke because they know they can and will do much more.

Actually, the above probably says as much about Starbucks as anything else.

There is something melancholic about waiting around the ass end of Logan—the AirTran gate known as 1C—for the last flight to Atlanta. There is something even more melancholic in knowing that when I land, I’ll have to make my way across the airport to the rental cars and drive another two hours into the heart of Tennessee. Ah well. It beats waiting for a flight to Chattanooga.