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October 10, 2006

Travel Makes You Tired

I'm back. And, hoo boy, am I tired.

Allie phoned me at work today and harassed me about my profound Lack O' Blogging these past few weeks ("Um, there was this great blog I used to read before the author apparently disappeared off the face of planet Earth..."), and, of course, she was right. The blog's been, well, a little barren of late.

The reason? Travel.

Yeah, all that oh-so-sexy travel I was planning to do for work has now transpired, which took me 'round the globe, to places as disparate as Bentonville, Arkansas and Munich, Germany, with side trips to Virginia, New York, Minnesota, and (just to round out the mix a bit) Canada.

Continuously traveling for a month just wiped me out. I've had more packets of peanuts than I care to admit, have sat on my butt for far, far longer than I ever anticipated, suffered through (several) computer breakdowns and paid more than a few times for that magical $5 in-flight mini-bottle of Chardonnay.

Hence: no blogging. There's something creatively draining about sitting at the bar of the airport Holiday Inn in Rochester, New York at 11 PM, ordering whatever (greasy) food they're still serving, and trying to get your thoughts wrapped 'round your next day. (I felt like The Narrator from Fight Club on more than one occassion.)

That said, I'm home (and close to taking a much needed vacation in Paris with 'Lane), have finally caught up on my sleep, and am now rubbing my eyes and blinking at my computer monitor. Expect semi-regular updates as we go.

Oh, a few notes from the Germany trip. No particular order:

• When you fly internationally at LAX, you go to the Tom Bradley International Terminal. It's a building that's forever stuck in 1972, down to the tile on the walls and the brown carpet. It's not the most auspicious way to start your journey abroad.
• (Tom Bradley does have a handful of open WiFi networks, though, so it's not as 1972 as it appears.)
• Tom Bradley doesn't board flights directly. So a really cool thing they do is to gather up all the passengers at the gate and then load 'em on to a bus to ride along the tarmac to the plane itself. (I felt like an astronaut, or something!)
• One of my fellow passengers to Munich looked exactly like the evil German guy from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" whose face got melted. Exactly. Down to the handkerchief, and everything!
• Lufthansa is an awesome airline. They're very professional, the flight attendants speak six languages (!), they have in-flight WiFi (at least, for as long as Connexion stays up), good food, and serve complimentary cocktails.
• Unlike almost every other airline on Earth, I find it relatively easy to sleep on Lufthansa. (See "complimentary cocktails", above.)
• Munich is a very, very lush, very green city. The airport is clean, modern - very European. I fell instantly in love.
• It was totally cool to go back to Germany. I'd not been since '89, and my language skills were, um, rusty, to put it politely. It came back to me, though - I'd stare at a sign ("Geldautomat?") or overhear a conversation, and suddenly know what the heck was going on ("Cash machine!"). My speaking skills were undoubtedly embarrassing, but I was able to get around OK - ordering food, talking to cabbies, and so on. I loved it.
• The city of Munich itself is like something you'd see at EPCOT - lots of glass and steel and concrete. It's so clean, too - honestly, it's like a zoomed-up scale model of a city, rather than a gritty, dirty urban center.
• Everyone drives a BMW, Mercedes, or VW.
• (No, really.)
• Signs for just about everything were in a sort of Genericized International Pictogram, like reading IKEA furniture assembly instructions. (I half expected to be handed an Allen wrench.)
• I made it to Oktoberfest - twice. The first time was shortly after arrival on Sunday night, and the second was on Wednesday, after business wrapped up. The scope of the thing is just massive, and totally exceeded my expectations. They have roller coasters (!), and yes, the beer is wonderful.
• My PC died (again) on this trip. (I seem to have the worst luck with laptops right now.) As such, I spent a lot of time working in the hotel business center, banging away on their machines.
• Fun Fact: German keyboards are not standard QWERTY. The Z and the Y are transposed, for instance, while the "@" is hiding alongside the "Q" and the "/" is located above the "7". It makes for a fun exercise in touch-typing: I'd type "crazy", and wind up staring at some Chechnyan word.
• We had business in Frankfurt, so we rented a car and I finally got to fulfill my teenage-boy fantasy of driving on the Autobahn. It was excellent. German roads are well-designed and well-maintained, and the rental was a Mercedes (natch). So we cranked the car up to see what it could do, and I managed to set a personal land-speed record of slightly-better than 220 kph (or 138 mph, in local parlance).
• (It's worth pointing out that my previous, personal land-speed record of 125.4 mph was set at the Richard Petty Driving Experience at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida in 2002. I was in a NASCAR vehicle on a closed track, wearing a jumpsuit and crash helmet, and restrained by a 5-point safety harness.)
• Even at 138 mps, the Mercedes was like glass.
• I've become addicted to John Grisham novels as a way of passing the time on flights. I've read "The Broker", "The King of Torts", "The Summons", and "The Street Lawyer" - and am halfway through "The Chamber." I buy these things at the Hudson News outlets and just chew 'em up. Awesome.

Damn, it's good to be home.

UPDATE, December 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at October 10, 2006 9:20 PM. Posted to Travel.

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