This week I departed on the longest business trip so far. I left for Boston early Monday morning after a long night of emergency server maintenance with only 3 hours of sleep. Just before boarding, I ran into some friends with some exciting travel ahead. They were adopting a newborn from Florida and had been notified that she had been born. Made me forget for a moment I was tired. The travel was pretty uneventful (the best kind), but I was overtired and couldn’t seem to rest well on the plane. I had one short stop in Minneapolis and arrived in Boston mid-afternoon. I was still troubleshooting some fallout from the previous nights server troubles so I was glued to my phone, logging into various portals and fixing settings on servers over 2,000 miles away. By the time I had shuffled my onto the bus and over to the rental hub, the issue was taken care of and I picked up my rental car. I left Boston, making my way up the coast to Portland, Maine in a little Kia Soul.
The company I work for, TREC was acquired last year by a Portland based company, Woodard & Curran with many offices located throughout the east. This trip was for me to meet my IT peers face to face and talk about the challenges facing us with the merging and melding of our systems. The time went by fast. Before I knew it, Wednesday came and I headed back down to Massachusetts, except to Dedham this time to spend the following morning at another office. Before I left Portland, I made sure to get two things accomplished; See a lighthouse and eat some lobster.
Thursday afternoon, I made my way back to Logan International Airport to go visit Shreveport, Louisiana. Before my flight I grabbed a bite to eat and ran into a very cute old couple from Maine, waiting for their flight to Europe for a vacation. I forgot how much fun it is to talk to people you don’t know. I had one stop in Atlanta, Georgia that was supposed to have a 3 hour layover. Upon arrival, my phone made me aware of an earlier flight to Shreveport that I could take. I thought it was a no-brainer, but the flight ended up being delayed by mechanical issues and then was stuck circling the airport due to a thunder storm blowing through the area. The flight that I was supposed to be on landed five minutes before we did.
I spent the next day working at a client’s office fixing a system that is used for GIS work. One day isn’t quite enough time to take in a city, especially when you are working for most of it. It does leave me with the desire to revisit all these locations and spend a little more time in the areas. Hopefully next time I won’t be traversing two-thirds the nation to do so.
And now I’m just a few hours away from returning back to my lovely wife and warm home in Bozeman. I’m not really looking forward to the 12 hours of travel time tomorrow. Hopefully no delays arise and I can make it home on time. Here are a few pictures of my trip, mostly of the Portland Head Light lighthouse and one from my hotel room in Shreveport of the Lightning.
