The Drudgery of Business Travel
It can easily be said that travel is a passion of ours. Barb and I look forward to our Excellent Adventures each year and spend most of the year before that planning them.
Business travel, on the other hand, has little in the way of fun that our vacations do.
I think that it’s the excitement of traveling to a fun place and looking forward to tasting the local culture is where the real enjoyment comes from. When you know that youre going to a place for business (no matter how nice of a place it is), you just dont get any of that excitement.
On this trip I’m traveling with two other guys from the office and I’ve found that this will make things a lot more enjoyable. Going on business trips alone has to be the worst of the worst. Well, I guess that perhaps traveling with someone whomyou don’t like is probably worse.
When packing up the suitcase last night, I found myself stuffing more and more electronics into it. I think that on this trip I’m armed with more hi-tech equipment than I’ve ever traveledwith. Among the inventory includes my new Dell Axim Pocket PC and separate fold-out keyboard (which I’m using now to compose this), my laptop computer, cell phone and my digital camera. I’ve got to be packing at least 5-6 various cables for rechargers and interface cables with me. Considering that we’re only gone for 5 days, I’m not exactly traveling light.
We made our connection from Toronto to Washington D.C. Without too much trouble. We had to go through the usual security checks and since we were flying to D.C., they really checked through all of our carry-on luggage pretty thoroughly. All the shoes were inspected and the security people rifled through all of our carry on luggage.
We were all staying at a hotel called the Wyndham Washington D.C. The Wyndham hotel chain is pretty swank and I had stayed at one of their hotels in Dallas a few years back on another conference. While the one in Dallas was quite a nice treat, the Wyndham Washington was defiantly not their flagship location. The web site made a statement about “recently renovated” but this is really code for “really old but weve slapped on a new coat of paint and changed the carpets”. I guess I can’t really complain because Ive certainly stayed in a lot worse but we ended up visiting someone at the Renaissance hotel which is next to the convention centre and this one was certainly in a different league.
One of the things that I wanted to do as soon as I checked into the hotel room was to get online and check my email. The Wyndham advertised wireless Internet in every room and since I was packing two wireless devices I figured that this would be easy enough to get connected. As it turned out, wireless Internet is available in a variety of places that I went to in those 4 days but none of them were free. In every case you had to sign upand pay for access either by the minute, hour or day. As it turned out the hotels wireless Internet access was the cheapest and I finally got connected. This trip was the first opportunity to test out the real life connectivity issues for our upcoming trip to Italy this fall and I learned a number of lessons about how easy of difficult it will be to get online with my Dell X50 in another country. The bottom line is that it is likely that there will be no free wireless Internet access in any country that I go to but as long as I know up front what the costs are I can plan around that. The most important thing is that there is some Internet access of any type so I can things posted.
During the four days that we were in D.C., I had an opportunity to travel around the city on their Metro and it is first class. I’ve found that the subway in every city in the world that we have gone to pretty muchall work the same and Washington’s was no different.
One the last night of our trip we had a really nice dinner at a restaurant called Smith Wollensky. I’ll do a separate posting of our dining experience at this place – suffice to say that it was a great meal.
This morning before we headed back to the airport to return home we spent several hours at the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum. As I have found with other large museums like this it all end up being sensory overload but you can’t go to Washington and not see the Smithsonian. There are actually several Smithsonian museums and the Air and Space museum are just one. Overall it was a great experience and I highly recommend anyone to take the time to check it out.
Baden
