Last night I drove 250 miles – in the rain pretty much the whole time. While it might not have been the best weather to drive in, there was no traffic and I got there as quickly as you can. The entire East Coast was being hammered by a pretty heavy storm and everything from New Jersey to Massachusetts got anywhere from 2 to 4 inches of rain.
I checked into the room without incident as usual. Now that I have the Hilton app I can pick my room and I always pick the first floor near one of the side entrances. This makes lugging all my crap, including my bike, much easier.
Brian is also in town for this work event and we met at the sports bar to watch a little bit of football and get something to eat. I got a Cobb salad with dressing on the side which is about as healthy as you can eat at a sports bar. Meal was actually pretty good and the football game was entertaining. It was good to see Brian who I haven’t seen since we went to Minnesota in the summer.
We called it a night pretty early and I was asleep before 11 o’clock.
Since it’s raining so much there’s no way I was riding my bike this morning. When I woke up it was still coming down so any chance of that went out the window. That is all well and good because I knew this was going to happen. I did start my day with a very tasty cup of coffee, as usual.
After that I went to the hotel gym, warmed up for 15 minutes on one of the cardio machines, then I lifted some weights. I’m not entirely over my back injury from the last few weeks. I say the word injury but in reality it’s just a recurring bad back. I tweak it, then I take care of it, then it goes away, then it’s fine for a while, then I do something stupid and I hurt it again.
I had some time this morning and I was going to need to find some coffee before the end of this trip. So I took a drive to Worcester and hit up a place called Acoustic Java. I had no idea if it was going to be good or not but they had a very impressive array of coffee beans for sale. They also had several poor overs, one of which I got for the drive back. It became obvious very quickly that this was excellent coffee. I would later make another cup of coffee in the room, which was a different bean than the one I had at the shop, and it was absolutely fabulous.
As a side note I brew better pour over coffee in my hotel room than pretty much most coffee shops in the country do.
Brian and I met for breakfast after I got back, then we both went back to our rooms and did some work until 12:30 or so. Then we went to the bowling alley which is where our company Christmas party was this year. It’s not the entire company, just a few departments. We were maybe 25 people in total.
We started with bowling and I won both games. I did not win anything.
Then we did axe throwing which was interesting for a few minutes but quickly got boring. I was probably the best axe thrower in our group which doesn’t really say much. I did have the longest streak of getting the axe to stick in the wood. My high score was nine.
After that we spent some time in the arcade but that got boring pretty quickly. The games just aren’t good as a general rule. We rounded out the day just hanging out after the party was over. By the end it was only five of us and we just sat around the table talking about whatever. At all it was actually a pretty enjoyable day.
After that Brian and I went back to the hotel and chilled out in our own rooms for a little bit before meeting up for dinner again at the sports bar to watch Monday night football and eat moderately possible food.
Traveling Normandy 