I wake up at 5:00 am, take a shower, do some blogging. The Uber takes a while to arrive and I try to relax in the car. It’s going to be a long day.
Why am I going on this trip? It’s one of the things we do here, to maintain contacts with the org. In total I think I will end up writing 15 blog posts about travel to Santa Clara which covers my time working at Espressive, from August 2019 through May 2020. I’m writing all 15 after I have moved on, so some of the perspective may be skewed. In hindsight, one admits that these trips were sometimes useful, often pointless.
The security line at EWR is huge, maybe the longest ever. I wait almost an hour. I get through TSA then grab a cappuccino.
The flight is easy. I watch Rocketman which is a great soundtrack, and a good enough movie. I work, read. Before I know it I’m there. The flight lands early then sits on the tarmac waiting.
Why is it that at the end of a flight everyone feels you deserve a good meal? So hungry as I walk off this plane.
While waiting for the Uber I talk to a flight attendant and ask him where it is he goes on these layovers. Apparently United has rental rooms all over the world, and you get what you get, though it’s a nice place, to hear him tell it, and the scheduling is well-done. You never know who will be there but overall he had positive things to say about it. I find this perspective of flight logistics interesting.
The ride to the office is 35 minutes. I get right to lunch, which I ordered on Friday. I got sushi and the company is making poutine today. The CEO is a Canadian and his brother sent a lot of squeaky cheese to him recently.
Work is whatever. At this writing I have no idea why I was here and Tommy has yet to arrive.
We get dinner at the hotel across the way and it’s meh. Somehow the dinner narrative is always like this. Nobody makes a decision and you end up at the easy place, which is never the good place. So it goes.
After dinner I walk to the room and talk to D, going past the stadium like I often do.
The Airbnb is a box, albeit a well-secured box. The place sucks and that’s a generally positive-looking review of the place. Oh well, they can’t all be winners.
By 9:30 I am out like a light.
Traveling Normandy 