Category: Travel

I’m going to be busy today catching up, so this is just a quick note to say that I made it back, even if my luggage didn’t.

More later.

I have a new motto for traveling, and it is this: Be careful with plug adapters when you are traveling in a country that is on 240 volts current. My work laptop’s power adapter is dual voltage, but its power plug has a grounding prong and my plug adapter, which allows it to use the German outlets, leaves the grounding prong exposed. Turns out that there is a nontrivial chance of shorting the grounding plug inside the outlet, and one of my colleagues (not me, thank goodness) managed to create the short.

Bam. The lights went out, a pop came from my laptop. And I smelled smoke.

Fortunately we have a good international support contract with our vendor, and the laptop should be fixed tomorrow.

But in the meantime I’m learning how to type on a German keyboard, and understanding how “Copy” and “Paste” are translated in the German version of Windows, thanks to the loaner laptop that our IT manager provided.

(PS: Rauch, in German, means smoke.)

Well, I made it and I’m feeling better now, thankyouverymuch. But it was a long trip. I left Boston at 10 pm Saturday and flew into Frankfurt at 10:50 am Sunday local time, then ran through passport control to make my 12:30 connection to Munich. Then I took more than an hour and a half to take the train system (which is really wonderful here in Munich, by the way, no complaints) to my hotel.

After that, I took a shower, and things started looking up. Then my coworker Bob and I went out walking in the city center, and somehow (how does this happen to me?) ended up at the Augustiner brewery where we had dinner in their very excellent, very traditional “brästuben.” And when I say “very traditional,” I mean we sat at a table with a bunch of strangers, facing the oompah band in one direction and the horse stables in the other. Really. The traditional brewery horses had been brought in from their pastures to become accustomed to the city noises and traffic in preparation for Oktoberfest next weekend, and we could see them through a glass window. unfortunately, Bob got some other benefits—somehow some very persistent flies were making it over into the dining room and attempting to monopolize his attention.

Our company was excellent, too: two German speaking couples who were very kind with our lack of the language, and one pair of college age sisters from Ohio State—one new graduate and one freshman getting a head start on her beer drinking. We could probably get them into trouble, or at least embarrass them by mentioning how the younger one was drinking the older sister under the table, if we had gotten their names.

As alluded yesterday, I’m about to board a plane for a week of business travel in Munich. Or, more precisely, I’m currently seated on the floor of Terminal E at Logan Airport, near gate 8A where apparently national security considerations have precluded providing sufficient seating for transatlantic traffic. Not that it matters. I will be sitting down for an awfully long time.

I should be fairly gleeful; I’m fairly resigned. Partly because of exhaustion—I drove Lisa and our dogs to the Jersey shore last night so that she could attend a family wedding today, and our dogs could have some supervision next week. Meaning that I drove the five hours back from New Jersey today, then caught my breath and started packing.

Partly, I think, because I’m just plain exhausted. When talking to my sister on Wednesday, she observed that I didn’t sound like myself. I’m tired. And this time I don’t have a job search, a coast-to-coast move, or anything else to blame. I’ve been on edge and anxious for months for no good reason.

The one thing I know is that I will be among colleagues when I get to Munich. Our company’s German office has sent more than a few people that I work with on business travel to the States in the past six months. So even if I don’t understand a word that anyone else says in the next week, I’ll at least understand my coworkers.

Right now, though, I’m hoping I can just get some sleep tonight. I need to meet my colleague, the company’s other product manager, tomorrow night in Munich for a beer, and it won’t look good if I’m passing out in the middle of a biergarten a full week before Oktoberfest begins.

I could write more—about the miserable failure of the iGo system, about pedal to the metal from 9 in the morning to 1:45 in the afternoon, meaning that I was coming close to some speeds I’ve previously only driven in Death Valley—but I’m probably saying enough considering that I probably won’t update this blog for another eight days. Feel free to use this as an open thread, all you regular readers (yes, you four). But if you’re a comment spammer, I hope you drown in your own pork by-products while I’m gone.

There’s something about business travel, even to a location with high-speed Internet, that makes it challenging to keep to a normal posting schedule. In our case here, the specific issues were:

1. A game of golf, my first ever, played on a partly rainy day on Tuesday
2. A bad cold that started arriving yesterday

I do not think that (b) is connected, at least not directly, to (a). I rode in a four passenger vehicle on Monday with a woman who was in the throes of a bad cold, and so far my symptoms (coughing, aching head, congestion) seem consistent with hers. Still, I’m pretty sure that the golf game didn’t help my resistance.

My first round of golf, a full 18 holes, did two things. It opened a door into a world of male competition (our foursome and our competitors were all men) that I had not previously witnessed directly, and it made me aware how out of shape I am, at least from an upper-body perspective. I think my shoulders have stopped aching. Regarding the former, I will not disclose my score. It wouldn’t be a useful number, because we played best ball off the tee (we all played to the hole from the ball that went furthest on the drive), and because we all agreed to hold our scoring to eight strokes a hole max, so as not to inhibit the progress of a game. There were a few par threes, owing to the best ball rule, where I broke that eight-stroke ceiling and actually landed the ball in the hole on five or six strokes, but the rest of my scorecard is a wall of eights.

The good news is that I have nowhere to go but up. Heh.

Funny postlude: we were discussing career paths over an after dinner drink last night, and I prefaced a statement with the clause “Having spent most of my childhood and teenage years in a library…” The presales engineer who gave me the most pointers snorted, then asked, “Really? You didn’t spend them on the golf course?” Zing.

As it turns out, the resolution of my morning flat was relatively painless. I called a towing service, they took it to the dealership, the dealership managed the rest (doubly appropriate since I needed a scheduled service visit anyway). The kicker, unfortunately, was that the injury to the new tire wasn’t a manufacturing defect but a very long nail, and so the replacement wasn’t covered under warranty. Ah well.

In the meantime we’re eating well here at Stoweflake.

I haven’t been writing as much the last few days, partly because the show floor has kept me busy, partly because the hotel wanted me to pay for WiFi even if I already bought a day of wired Internet use in my room. Memo to Starwood: for a luxury hotel, you’re sure making me feel nickeled and dimed to death.

I had good luck on this trip with restaurants, thanks to the eGullet Forums. Monday night we tried Oola on Folsom Street, just a block or so south and west of the Moscone Center. Fabulous. A salad of peppery arugula and heirloom tomatoes followed by a daube of lamb with root vegetables—which in the 50-degree San Francisco summer night was richly fulfilling rather than overwhelming as it might have been anywhere else in the continental US. Great wine list—though a little light on my favored Southern Italian wines, they did have a Greco di Tufo from a producer I had never heard of and a good selection of Cotes du Rhone wines, which made up for it. Good ambience too, even if it was a former elevator repair shop.

Tonight my coworker and I were looking for an early meal before we headed airportward, and he suggested sushi. I found recommendations for Ino and we went. I think it was some of the finest sushi and sashimi I’ve ever had. The nigiri, with a little wasabi paste between the fish and the rice, was super fresh and bracing; the sashimi was just brilliant. I have to put in a special word for the unagi, which is broiled to order and served with a suggestion to skip the soy sauce, and may be the most perfect serving of eel I’ve ever tasted. The restaurant itself is tiny, a small mom and pop shop in a Japanese-focused shopping mall next to the Radisson, and very clean—the finished nigiri is placed directly on the sushi bar in front of you. The service was great and personable too, with the wife giving my co-worker a hard time for ordering a Coke (he sheepishly changed to a glass of white wine) and both owners filling us in on the best place to catch a cab after dinner. Highly recommended.

Written Saturday afternoon as I rode south from Boston:

I’m on the Acela, a few minutes outside New Haven. The car is filling up, but I have no seat companion as yet. The sun was out as we traveled along the Atlantic coast in Rhode Island and the early part of Connecticut, and it was as though we skimmed just above the surface of the water as we crossed coastal inlets and rivers. We’re inland now, and the scenery is, in that peculiar Northeast way, uglier; where there is no trash along the tracks, there are industrial parking lots or brown bracken covered banks. But there are still plots of wetlands here and there among the parked tanker trucks and huddled subdivisions, their backs to the train.

Part of the feeling of coasting is the inexpensive pair of noise cancelling headphones I picked up on my last trip to San Francisco. I’m trying to keep up my policy of listening at least once to every new track I add to my iTunes library, so my iPod is full of enormous lossless copies of various classical and jazz tracks. At the moment it’s the Keller Quartet’s string version of The Art of the Fugue.

In fact, the only thing missing at present is an Internet connection. At the speed we’re moving, no open networks stay accessible long enough to permit a WiFi connection. It’s kind of fun seeing the names of some of the secured ones, though, such as the thoughfully named “Honeypot”. It’s also nice, frankly, just being able to use the laptop, something that becomes just about impossible with the less generously proportioned seats in coach on the airplane.

Tomorrow kicks off a virtual “road month” for me. I’m taking the train to the Brackbill family picnic tomorrow; leaving the picnic early on Sunday to fly to San Francisco for the Pink Elephant ITIL Case Studies Symposium; coming back only to turn around next week for a sales meeting in Stowe, Vermont; then relaxing for a week prior to the Munich trip in mid-September. Hopefully it will be quiet for the rest of September, as I also have a trip to the HDI ITIM conference in early October.

Of all the travel, I’m most looking forward to the trip tomorrow. I get to spend time with my first-cousin-once-removed Johnathan. I spoke to him on the phone for the first time yesterday (when I met him before, he was too busy putting things in his mouth to have learned to speak yet). I’m looking forward to teaching him “A birdie with a load of dirt” and other family jokes.

Through some fortuitous and entirely accidental timing (at least on my part), it appears I’ll have my first visit to my company’s European office in Munich in September. I will be there for a week, starting September 12.

Oktoberfest begins the Saturday of that week, September 17.

As Bob Dylan once wrote, “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”

There is more information about the festival at Wikipedia, including descriptions of the traditional menu and a pointer to information about the traditional beer style of the event, Märzen.

…in the English language than, “There’s no time to go siteseeing and no time to get good barbecue.” Particularly when you’re in Memphis.

Oh well. I’ll be home tonight; that makes up for a few things.

I sit in a hallway in Terminal D in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, sharing the long wall outside Gate D2 with perhaps 30 soldiers in desert camouflage. A few minutes ago, a woman with a Georgian accent walked by and asked the bald soldier next to me with the white iPod earbuds where they were headed. “Back overseas,” he replied. The woman with her asked, rather foolishly, “Where to?” as her friend said, “Good luck!” “Thank you,” he replied, not answering the other question.

You don’t ever fly straight into Atlanta; you always spiral down into it, circling in patterns known only to migratory birds, surveillance and mapping satellites, and air traffic controllers. So, your right shoulder aching from being pressed to the seat back—or your seatmate—by the force and your stomach sinking a bit as the plane circles, you get the feeling that Atlanta is on a high mountaintop surrounded with fog. In reality, the airport is on miles of blistering hot concrete surrounded by smog, but that’s neither here nor there.

I got off a conference call this morning with industry analysts and drove to Logan, stopping at home to pack a few things. I’m making a quick flight down to Memphis to talk to our customer there. I haven’t been in the city of the blues, Elvis, and MLK’s death for seven years, since we visited the week after we got married in the fall of 1997. It seems like yesterday.

The gray-haired man next to me, with the white mustache that reminds me of my uncle’s—my uncle John spent years in both the Army and the Navy before opting for more conventional pursuits—says that everyone is in for a long wait. Seems that they’s be flying out the same time that I am. I hope I can find the gate in the crowd of camouflage.

There’s no WiFi at this end of Terminal D, just too many gates for too many small airlines. I actually saw a Hooters Air sign on the terminal directory, though I haven’t actually seen a gate for it since I arrived. Maybe the Hooters street team posted the sign on the directory surreptitiously to build demand.

What I have seen is PSPs, two of them so far, the first I’ve seen outside a Sony store. The eleven-year-old next to me from Baltimore to Atlanta had one—he was using it to watch movies, and not Spider-Man, I was amused to notice. The soldier on my left now is playing a first person combat shooter. From where I’m sitting the resolution looks about like the game of Quake I used to play after hours at AMS, though the sound is a good deal tinnier from the PSP speakers. I’d normally, bitter liberal that I am, crack a joke about an offduty soldier playing a first person shooter, but there’s no mileage in it, he’ too young—probably ten years younger than me.

I give up my seat on the wall to another young soldier who is rocked back on his haunches and either being amused or irritated—it’s hard to tell which—by the other civilian sitting on the wall, another ten year old who keeps asking, So how many soldiers are you? A thousand? Four hundred? I find myself thinking, influenced by the WWII movie I saw last night, that he’s going to get in trouble as a spy for asking so many questions.

The Airborne Rangers are queuing up now, last and final boarding call has been made and they are clearing the lounge. A father is hugging his infant kid goodbye, his other children and wife standing by, then kisses his wife and joins the queue. Just another departure, this one on Omni Air, a name intoned darkly by the mustache-bearing soldier in the hallway.

Suddenly, now that the crying kids have subsided or left with their mothers, the lounge seems much quieter. It looks odd with only a few uniforms left, like the color has left it. They’re boarding our flight now; our journey seems tame by comparison.

I forgot to mention my other activity from Friday. After putting in a morning’s work, I drove from Pittsfield due west on Rt 20 to the Hancock Shaker Village. The village, which was active from the 19th century during Mother Ann’s Work through 1959, still has almost all its original buildings, plus furniture and fixtures.

It was pouring on Friday, so I wasn’t able to spend as much time as I wanted, but I got some good photos (posted, for the sake of trying something new, at Flickr).

An unfailingly practical people, the Shakers: similar in some ways to the Amish, the other outsider community with whom I have strong family ties, but vastly dissimilar in others. The adoption of electricity, for instance: the Shakers diverted a creek to power a turbine and were the first folks with electricity in Berkshire County.

I have now figured out the secret of surviving a Tanglewood residency. It involves a car, a map, and an Internet connection.

To back up: I had a hazy, mystical picture of life at Tanglewood prior to arriving here, including random music clinics with the famous and artistic; brushes with genius at every turn; and the sort of breezy camaraderie that goes with all good choirs. I am in the process of recalibrating my expectations.

For one thing, most of my fellow 178 choristers seem to have made plans well in advance for every meal and don’t linger about after rehearsals, leaving us newbies to shift for ourselves. (In fact, another Tanglewood first timer to whom I gave a lift today decided that he was going to hike around, and hike back the five miles to his hotel, after we tried unsuccessfully for half an hour to find a group to join for lunch.) For another, we are early in the season, and the masters classes appear not to have started (or to not be advertised to the hoi polloi, at any rate). What to do?

Well, for me, the solution was to do a solid afternoon of work for the office, and then to strike out on my own. And if you know me, you know that means beer. In particular, thanks to a BeerAdvocate recommendation, I found my way 10 miles north up Route 7, which runs from the Mass Pike past Lenox and through Pittsfield, all the way up to Lanesboro, where I found Ye Olde Forge, which claims it has the “county’s largest selection of imported and domestic beer.”

And it just might. The draft list was about fifteen beers—numerically nothing spectacular, but when those fifteen include Belhaven Scottish Ale and Delerium Nocturnum, your writer tends to sit up and pay attention. Add to that a long (if incompletely stocked) list of bottled offerings and a pub menu that stretches from mussels to chicken fingers to etoufée, and you have a minor mecca on your hands.

(Chicken fingers? Well, Ye Olde Forge is family friendly, as evidenced by the two young kids at the table across the way from me. The younger child got off the best line I heard today when, looking at the bar TV which was showing the Tour De France, he solemnly told his mom that he didn’t ever want to go to France. “Why not?” “Because I don’t want to be run over by bicycles.”)

Anyway, I recommend Ye Olde Forge—and I recommend arriving early, particularly on a rainy summer evening when the patio isn’t open.

A lost day due to travel. I’m not bouncing back as fast as I used to. More tomorrow.