I received a call during late August. The owner was having issues with a fast-paced small project. The project is about 350 miles from my home. There aren’t any flights to the location with it being located in a remote rural area of New Mexico. This was going to be a one week trip, but as the week progressed it was evident that I needed to stay a second week. The travel back and forth is by rental car, I would head home each Saturday. While nothing exciting happened on these road trips or turn into the adventures of the classic movie ‘Vacation’. It was a lot of miles.
The first trip was during that the last week of August. Since that time, the one week trip turned into two weeks and then three. I ended up needing to go back yet again and made the trip four times. The total drive was 2,800 miles. Reflecting back on the month of September, I was home eight days. But I did sneak in a vacation to Ohio. If going to Ohio (sorry Mark, Thad and Lane) is a vacation, then we will just call it that. My mother-in-law lives about a 100 miles south of Columbus. And then my Sister-in-law is another 40 miles south. My wife and I were there five days and made the trip south twice a day. Racking up another 320 miles plus the Columbus round trip of 200 miles.
Before I headed out to CONSTRUCT, I had travel by rental car over 3,320 miles. Originally, I was planning on flying to Long Beach from Tucson. But then it turned into an opportunity for my Wife and Daughters to make it a mini vacation. So, I get to add another 980 miles by car to the month of September. Bringing the grand total to 4,300 miles. To put this in perspective, New York to Los Angeles is 2,800 miles. The ‘drive’ from my house in Tucson to Juneau Alaska is also about 2,800 miles. Which I did just visiting New Mexico four times, I would have preferred going to Juneau.
Back to the trip to CONSTRUCT. With all of the driving, I took advantage of walking to the convention. Each day I would average about 5 miles, a couple of miles plus the miles of walking on the show floor heading to lunch. You have to love those watches that double as fitness monitors. And yes, I have Apple Watch, a lot of cool functions like messaging, fitness tracking, email previews, answer phone calls (just like Dick Tracey) plus it tells time too. I did make the mistake of walking to CSI Night Out at the Queen Mary. My map said it was about a ½ mile, but when I got to the location, there wasn’t a large ship, a little boat or even a paddle wheel. In fact, there wasn’t any water. So, I did a quick google and found an address of the Queen Mary only to discover I had another 1.5 miles to walk. But after all that driving, I was good with walking. The good news, I made it to the event and my good friend and ex-boss Dennis DeLisse gave me a ride back to the hotel. I’ll dig more into CONSTRUCT in the next couple of blogs. But let’s just say I almost left my phone in Dennis’ car and had to sprint after him, so glad I enjoy running.
We are now in the second week of October, I’m in Pinetop Arizona. I thought I would take a moment and get this blog thing going again. After taking September off, with so much travel. I figured I could write from the Hotel room. That’s right I’m on another road trip racking up another 400 miles. The good news, is, I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel. I will be home this Saturday, only to hit the road again. Where am I going, this will be a nice bookend. I head back to New Mexico to do my punch of the project that started all this. Now, if car rental places had frequent driver miles like the airlines, I think they would owe me.
…and now for something completely different.
It would take a sloth one month to travel one mile. Not so different, but with 5,400 hundred miles in 7 weeks. It would take that sloth 450 years to make the trip.