What a week. I spent the last 9 days on the road for business and personal reasons. It started with a 6 am flight down to California where I visited my grandparents from both sides. My grandma on my mom’s side was recently in a car accident and my grandpa on my dad’s side recently had a stroke. He will be going into surgery soon and so I wanted to spend some time with everyone. We made sure to catch Monday Night Football while eating my Grandma’s meatballs which are incredible (as both Greg and Steve can attest to). I also went running on the coast of Santa Monica (I included a picture below).
Amazingly, I am back in town, and not traveling for the greater part of 3 months, and it is quite possibly one of the greatest things ever.
I just went from Portland, OR to Honolulu, and was gone for 7 days straight. Usually people say, “Oh that’s rough, Hawaii,” or “Sounds hard,” and when they say this, I want to punch them. You see, there are two types of travel. There is travel travel, where you lay out on beach, order a drink and watch the swimsuit clad people walk by, and there is business travel. Business travel consists of 12 hour day trips, to a destination on the other side of the country. You stay there for 24-36 hours, and then travel back another 12. Usually it consists of 2:45 am shuttle rides, lack of sleep, hauling luggage, screaming kids on airplanes (that is if you don’t get delayed for 8 hours), time zone changes, jet lag, and unhealthy eating and work out patterns. It gets to the point where one conference room is the same as the other, a hotel room is just a hotel room, and airports are crowded noisy places with people whose sole purpose is to leave as fast as possible.
So to the people who don’t understand when I say that there is no place I would rather be right now than in Corvallis, Oregon, there you have it.
The one upside of the Hawaii trip was that I got a chance to go to Pearl Harbor and see the USS Arizona, which is a very intense place. It has an aura about it that I’ve never felt before, and you can’t help but imagine what it would have been like to be in the ship as it capsized. I included a couple pictures. Note that the flag always flies at half mast.
Pearl Harbor Memorial
Pearl Harbor Oil Spot
This second picture is one of an oil spot bubbling up from the ship. The entire memorial smells like gas, and every couple seconds oil bubbles up to rest on the surface of the water. When people asked why the oil hadn’t been cleaned up, the tour guide said that to clean up the water would be to desecrate the grave of the people who lay there.
On a more positive note, when I returned from the trip, it was nearly Halloween, and at Oregon State University, Halloween means one thing- parties! Not wanting to disappoint, Tom and I decided to get a little creative, and decided to dress up as Venus and Serena Williams. Needless to say it was by far one of the favorites at the parties.
Halloween at OSU
Next week, Greg, Tom and I head to Las Vegas for a conference. Texas Hold ‘Em here I come!
