Travel Log - Star date 20080421

Plane, train or automobile: All three!

Mission: Travel to Buffalo, NY. Being the good company soldier that I am, I took an obscenely early flight on a Sunday to save us $400. This means that I flew from ROA at 6:10 a.m. What I didn't realize was that I would be experiencing the Detroit Airport for the first time. If you have not been to DTW, I highly recommend it.

Here's why:


And now the monorail:


Here are some still shots of the monorail:

From DTW, I headed to Buffalo, NY. Since I got there at noon (and didn't have to be at my destination until 5 p.m.) I decided to visit Niagara Falls. Bear in mind that I am very frugal (or cheap), so rather than pay $10 to park for an hour, I walked in from a side street and down towards the Falls along the American Rapids:

Being cheap also means that I don't have a passport (does Travel Man need a passport? Does Superman file a flight plan with the FAA?) so all of these pics are from the American side. The "big" part of the Falls is the Horseshoe Falls, which is not nearly as impressive from the USA side:

The American Falls are very impressive however:

I definitely plan on coming back with the Girls sometime. I might even pay to park closer, or (gasp) get passports so we can see everything from the Canadian side.

Number of human interactions: 0

State(s) visited: MI, NY

City visited: Detroit, Niagara Falls

Interesting fact about this city: Um, did you see the vids and pics above?

Halpert says: Most. water. ever.

Travel Log - Star date 20080419

Plane, train or automobile: None. I had a planned week at home this week.

Mission: I had a very quick and vital mission dropped in my lap Wednesday morning. We did an internal Talent Search to assess some Division Manager candidates this week. I figured this would keep my supervisors busy and I could get some catch up work done, and do a little pre-emptive work. WRONG!

I was asked to "grade" some assessments from an activity that each candidate went through. The grading consisted of deciphering the candidates responses and mapping those responses to success factors required for the job they were interested in. There were approximately 60 items on each assessment that took me about 45 - 60 seconds EACH to sort and record. My quick math skills tell me that this meant about 45 - 60 minutes to complete one report. Guess how many I had to do??? 22 of them - in two days. I got about 7-8 done the first day, took 5 home with me that night, and did about 8-9 more the second day. Needless to say, I didn't get much else done. An analyst in our department thought the real purpose of the exercise was to test my knowledge of what behaviors fell into which success factors. I think she was right!

Number of human interactions: 22. On paper. In two days.

State(s) visited: Numbness??

City visited: None

Interesting fact about this city: Looking at roughly 1300 lines of data makes any city fact interesting - pick one!

Halpert says: Keep me away from that stuff!

Travel Log - Star date 20080412

Plane, train or automobile: None, actually.

Mission: Was supposed to be management training workshop. Workshop cancelled by higher ups. I spent some time in the office for once! We have been really busy lately - we have a new CEO and Executive Team, so there is no such thing as business as usual right now. I really like our new CEO - he spent some time with the son of our founder to learn about our core values and he is driving change back to those values. Our new CFO, Mike Norona (not to be confused with the song "My Sharona" by the Knack) is not your typical numbers guy. If you listen to him for 15 minutes, you want to rush home and balance your check book! He is that entertaining and funny.

Number of human interactions: 12

State(s) visited: Nada, zip, zero.

City visited: Salem, VA and Roanoke, VA

Interesting fact about this city: Salem was founded in 8000 BC, making it way cooler than Jamestown, VA (1607) or St. Augustine, FL (1529).

Halpert says: I was looking forward to visiting West Virginia again. Oh, well.

Travel Log - Star date 20080405

Plane, train or automobile: An airplane (or 4 if you want to get specific) and a rental Camcord (Camry / Accord). This was actually the Toyota version - a decent ride.

What a day on Friday!

Original plan - leave JAX at 6:10 pm, stop in Atlanta, arrive ROA at 9:30 pm.

Actual events - board plane in JAX at 7:20 pm. This group of guys in their early 20s is seated behind me and the one guy in the group that has traveled before is trying to impress his companions with his knowledge. He is going on about how we are on an Airbus, when one of the guys asks "Then why is the safety card for a Boeing 757?" He was much quieter after that.

There is a ground delay in Atlanta, but our pilot pushes away from the gate so that we can be first in line to leave when the ground delay is lifted. We sit for about an hour when we are informed that the delay might go until 9:30 pm. The pilot informs us that we are going to head back to the gate if people need to make other plans. This seems to be taking a while when the captain comes back on to tell us that the tug the pulls the plane in broke, so we have to wait for another tug to come over. We get back to the gate about 9 pm, at which time the ground delay is lifted, so we taxi out and are wheels up about 9:15 pm.

We get to Atlanta about 10:30 and I check the Delta flight schedules on the Raspberry. My flight to ROA is delayed until 11:45 - I will still get home tonight! Several delays and gate changes later, it is 11:41 pm. The information board at the gate shows a new departure time of 12:25 am with an arrival time of 11:40 pm. (I'll let that sink in...) The woman next to me sees the new departure time, sighs, then notices that something is not right with the departure time. I lean over and say "The good news is that we arrive one minute ago." She quickly moves to another seat.

We finally leave @ 1 am, and are wheels down in ROA at 2:05 am.

Mission: Leadership Skills training for 40 people.

Number of human interactions: Upwards of 50

State(s) visited: Florida ("Long have I yearned to return to the land of my birth...")

City visited: Jacksonville. This is one of my favorite places to visit.


Great climate.


Pro Football Team.


Great Regional Operations Team.


The hotel that I typically stay at is a new Hampton Inn and Suites with a gazillion restaurants within walking distance. I actually ate at Kokopellis two nights and Moe's only once - same type of food, only more veggies at Kokopellis.

Interesting fact about this city: Hosted Super Bowl XXXIX

Halpert says: My first time on a plane! I love the bag of peanuts - just the right size for me!