Category: Travel

During a conference call yesterday morning in Edmonton, we had a prospect from Calgary join us via videophone. At the end we mentioned we would be in Calgary in the evening and asked him for a restaurant recommendation. He said, without hesitation, “Buchanan’s.”

We got into town, settled into the hotel, and eventually made our way out to find Buchanan’s. After some initial confusion (downtown Calgary has a grid of numbered streets and avenues, leading us down to the corner of 7th Ave and 3 St when we really should have been at 7 St and 3rd Ave; sorry, Dan), we found Buchanan’s, and were thrilled.

It wasn’t so much the food, although it’s really hard to go wrong with thick cuts of Alberta beef; or the wine, although the 2001 superTuscan that we tasted was pretty spectacular; nor even the wall of over 200 different types of single malt Scotch behind the bar. What made it a great evening was the ambience and the staff. We ate in the lounge, which had the Yankees/Detroit game on (alas for all of us who were rooting to see the Yankees fall last night), and which had a wonderfully relaxed vibe, aided by the friendly presence of the owners. It felt a little like sitting in a quiet neighborhood bar.

We’ve had two pretty good meals here in the capital of Alberta. Today’s lunch was at the Café Select. I had their tomato soup and a spicy salad with fried squid, which was a lot tastier than it sounds.

Last night, though, was exceptional. We visited the Hardware Grill (on a recommendation from eGullet) and I had some spectacular lamb: lamb rib-eye wrapped with a combination of beef short ribs and foie gras in a Zinfandel reduction sauce. The wine list was all that you would expect in a Wine Spectator award winner.

As one of the commentators at the eGullet forum wrote, “Dining in Edmonton is a bit like stumbling around a catholic schoolgirl dorm — lots of boring, hardworking, plaid clad folk, but the odd mindblowing experience to be had if you knock on the right door.” I really can’t top that capsule review, so perhaps we’ll just leave it at that.

Since I’m going to be here a few more minutes, some notes about the experience flying out of Logan, which I’ve complained about bitterly at times: it’s not that bad, provided you are flying out at the beginning of the week and that you leave enough time before your flight is scheduled to depart.

Heresy, I know. But unlike an airport like O’Hare, which is never quiet and about as far from relaxed as you can get, it’s a small enough airport that you can catch your breath, even find a power outlet, without much trouble. It’s also big enough to have the basics: Starbucks, Dunkin, a really good shoe shine stand, and wifi—and while Massport’s monopoly in this area is somewhat controversial, I feel a lot better about it now that my money is going directly to Boingo (I finally gave in and bought a monthly subscription, and boy am I using it). It’s also better wifi than in O’Hare, where I almost always have trouble connecting for one reason or another.

The most quietly pleasant thing about the airport, I think, is sitting at a seat near a lot of windows, say near gate C-18, from around 6 am to 6:30 and watching the skies start to brighten as the airplanes glide by on the tarmac past the gates.

Today’s destination: Edmonton, then Calgary.

I’m not going to be in Edmonton very long, probably just long enough to recharge my laptop before a business meeting tomorrow. So I’m saving my energy for Calgary. Though we will just have missed the Calgary Film Festival, there should be enough going on in town that I should be able to find some entertainment somewhere. At least judging from the hotel bookings—I had a hard time finding a room anywhere in town. Note: it appears that most of the entertainment in Calgary involves cowboy regalia.

I’m also looking forward to getting some good steaks. I’m not sure anyone will be able to persuade me to try Rocky Mountain oysters, though.

I got home at 5:30 this morning from my trip to the LA region. The trip reiterated how superior the JetBlue experience can be if you are going to the right place. My colleague and I flew directly from Boston to Long Beach, had at the most an hour drive between Long Beach and our prospect in Pasadena (which mostly means we got lucky), and had two great cross country flights.

I also got to test the new revised rules about liquids on a plane (note: be careful on the TSA site! The home page crashes Safari!). My test apparatus was a quart sized ziplock bag containing a travel size tube of toothpaste and a travel size bottle of contact solution. The catch? My contact solution came in a 4 ounce bottle, and the rules state that anything 3 and under is safe.

First, from Logan on Tuesday (the first day of the new rules): before the ID check I was met by a screener, who asked if I was carrying liquids; I was and showed him the bag. He looked, made a note of the 4-ounce bottle on a paper form, and asked me to keep the plastic bag out of my baggage so that the security screeners could see it. I ran the bag through, and one of the screeners grabbed my bag and my form. He asked a supervisor about the four ounce bottle, got the OK, and handed it back.

On the way back, it was much the same process, except they made me put the bag in a tray instead of on the top of my duffle. Both times a supervisor had to step out and verify that my contact solution was OK.

Question: What is the difference between three ounces and 4? What is the impact of enforcing a one-ounce overage on our security teams? Why doesn’t contact lens solution come in a 3-ounce travel bottle? (It will now, I guess.)

Somehow in spite of the hectic travel schedule, my coworker and I found our way on the waterfront in Long Beach last night prior to heading back to the airport for our red eye, and somehow we landed at the Yard House. (Hey, things like that just seem to happen to me.)

Now, I should preface these remarks by noting that I don’t usually get maximum enjoyment out of visiting chain brewpubs or beer bars. Rock Bottom, Gordon Biersch, and other places of their ilk always seem a little unfocused, with too many people there for reasons other than the beer, and with too few beer lines cleaned regularly. The Yard House seems on first visit to be an exception to the rule: the list of beers on tap was, true to their word, long, with a good mix of imports (including some pretty rare Belgians, like the Maredsous 8) and local beers. I had a Spaten Optimator, since they didn’t have a Märzen, in honor of Oktoberfest, and then tried the Anderson Valley Brother David’s Tripel. Both were acceptable, though the Brother David seemed a little flabby for the style. Food was good (I had the Caesar with grilled ahi). All in all some small compensation for having to take a red eye back.

Well, that was quick. It’s amazing what putting together a five and a half hour meeting and a six hour plane flight in the same day can do to really chew up the time. I just flew into Long Beach and drove up to Pasadena where we have a meeting in the morning. This is my first time in the LA area outside the airport, and it feels odd. I feel like I should call Tony Pierce and ask him for advice, but I’m afraid that if I followed any suggestions he gave that I wouldn’t wake up in time for my meeting tomorrow. Plus, you know, he’s doing his own travel right now.

Just a quick note that I did, in fact, make it in last night. It’s taken me a while to get things going today thanks to the over 300 email messages in my personal account, many of them spam comments that needed managing.

Salt Lake is just as beautiful as I remember it. I haven’t strayed far enough from the hotel to determine if it’s just as weird too…

My flight from Boston arrived at 9:30 last night, something like two and a half hours past our planned departure. Of course, I had feared something like this, but when they were announcing the delay I had seen my bag loaded onto the plane and figured I was stuck with it for the long run. And of course the gate agent pointed out that there was a general delay at O’Hare, so most of us would make our connections. Right?

Heh. The flight to Salt Lake had left a half hour previously.

So I spent an hour in line to rebook my flight, twenty minutes walking to the airport Hilton, a quick four hours sleep, then back into the terminal to see what I could do. I missed my first opportunity on a morning flight—I was #3 on the standby list, but the flight was oversold and they actually had to forcibly rebook a paying passenger. So now I’m waiting for the flight I did get booked on, which will get me in after the first day of the show is over, in clothes I have been wearing for 36 hours, unshaven and bleary.

I don’t know why I still get upset about this stuff. The airlines have repeatedly proven, particularly at O’Hare, that keeping a schedule going is an art that exceeds their grasp. But it’s not funny any more.

When will I learn to stop saying things like “it looks like clear sailing”? My flight has been delayed two hours to Chicago, which makes me nervous about my connection to Salt Lake City. The good news is that everything in and out of Chicago is delayed, so I might actually make it. The bad news is that I probably won’t get there until well past midnight, and I have an early morning phone call the next day. And let’s not even think about luggage…

Traveling on the day before my wife’s birthday sucks.

Fortunately that’s the suckiest thing about this flight so far. I got here in plenty of time, have a seat (albeit a middle) to Chicago, and it looks like it’ll be clear sailing to the ITSMf meeting in Salt Lake City.

The last time I was in Salt Lake City, aside from connecting through the airport, was some eight years ago when I stayed there while doing some consulting in Ogden. I recall that they had some pretty good local microbrews, in spite of the Byzantine local liquor laws. But I can’t find any of them using BeerAdvocate, so I’ll have to hang loose and hope for the best.

I ended up on the road all day yesterday, so no update happened. It was a really surreal week in Mexico City, and I didn’t see that much of the city other than my hotel, our customer’s offices, and the roads in between. That’s pretty much a normal business trip, but because the hotel was in an office park, we didn’t really get any time at night to explore the local culture.

I have two lingering impressions of Mexico City. The first was walking down the street and mentioning to our host that the enormous double-deck elevated highway we were walking beneath surprised me, given Mexico City’s history of earthquakes. His wry response was, “Yes, that surprises us here too.” Mexico City has so many cars that there aren’t too many alternatives, apparently.

The other was watching the city recede beneath us as we took off—miles and miles of dense city and residential blocks of gray and brown concrete, livened with splashes of earth-tone colors, receding into the distance as far as the eye could see, lapping at the sides of the giant mountain peaks and hills that shrugged their way up from the plateau into the clouds. The contrast with Chicago, where our flight connected, could not have been more vivid—yes, miles and miles of residential blocks, but blocks that were tree-lined, with space between the buildings, green-lawned… all luxuries that were reserved for very few properties in Mexico City (at least from my vista near the airport).

The trip wasn’t a total loss, though. I ended up talking with my seatmates for the entire 90 minutes between Chicago and Boston. My companions were a Mexican girl who will be studying international relations for a year at the University of Maine, and John McBride, a managing partner McBride & Lucius who likes Father Ted and Janacek. It was definitely the most entertaining random conversation I’ve had in a while.

The blessing and curse of business travel is that while one gets to visit exotic locations that one would never have visited otherwise, they all tend to look the same.

I’m sitting in a very nice hotel in Mexico City—the suburbs, technically, looking out the window and waiting for the sun to come up over the mountain to the east. This is the technology center; we passed signs for EDS, HP, IBM, and FedEx among others on our way in. So far, aside from brushing my teeth in bottled water as a precaution (though the hotel has its own water treatment plant), I could be anywhere in Europe or the big cities.

Except that, on the way from the airport last night, we passed a colonial Spanish building sandwiched in between the access road and the main highway. And we saw intimations of the enormous cathedral and the Zocalo—the second largest public square in the world, after Red Square in Moscow—from the air coming in.

It will be an interesting three days to say the least.

One of my German colleagues is in town this week. As we sat through a design session this morning, he asked, “How do you say streber in English?”

I shrugged, and he said, “Go to Leo.org.” We looked in the English-German dictionary on the site, and we found the following translations: careerist, eager beaver, geek, grind, nerd, sap, striver.

So: streber. Sounds better than pencil-neck.

And no, I don’t remember why he asked me for the translation. It couldn’t have been something I did.

New York Times: Aircraft Bomb Plot Thwarted in Britain. Apparently the British police stopped a plot to blow up multiple airplanes flying from Heathrow to the US. The number of targeted flights ranges from 3 to 10 according to various reports. Wonderfully enough, the terrorists are believed to be still at large…

…which is no doubt why Doc Searls got stuck at Logan today. Sorry, Doc. At least there’s WiFi. Doc, I hope you’re near Legal Seafoods so you can at least get a good meal out of it. The Technorati tag being used to group these posts together is red810 (nice concept, btw).

More coverage: Boston Globe, which says this was a “minor inconvenience,” and the DHS page, which gives the details (threat level red, aka Elmo, for travelers flying from the UK to the US; orange, aka Ernie, for commercial aviation inside the US; yellow everywhere else. Good old Bert).