{"id":10185,"date":"2016-09-09T08:56:11","date_gmt":"2016-09-09T15:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/?p=10185"},"modified":"2016-09-09T18:10:48","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T01:10:48","slug":"the-month-of-many-travels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2016\/09\/09\/the-month-of-many-travels\/","title":{"rendered":"The Month of Many Travels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After several months without much excitement, airport security will be seeing me a lot during September and October:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>1-September<\/b>: After the second of two consecutive work trips to San Antonio my plane returned to LAX Thursday night at about 6PM, leaving ample time to do laundry and re-pack for the next flight about 36 hours later.<\/li>\n<li><b>3-September<\/b>: I dragged Audrey to LAX in the morning and we departed for a long weekend in Seattle.  After landing we grabbed a rental car, checked-in to our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cedarbrooklodge.com\/\">shockingly nice hotel<\/a>, and then I drove us up to Everett to see airplanes at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boeing.com\/company\/tours\/\">Boeing factory<\/a>.  Audrey and I usually try to meet each other halfway in our planning, but in this case she knew better than to suggest alternatives when I told her we&#8217;d be spending the afternoon with airplanes.  Seeing a factory full of giant jets in various stages of assembly had me basically running around screaming &#8220;AIRPLANES AIRPLANES AIRPLANES&#8221; for a few hours, and whether it was the impressive sight of the massive machines or the less-impressive sight of her dorky boyfriend having a complete geek-out, Audrey seemed OK with the events.  Afterwards, since I&#8217;m a lot to deal with under normal circumstances and can only imagine what a handful I must be when I become a grown-up three-year-old, I made sure she got a nice seafood dinner on the water as the sun went down over Puget Sound.<\/li>\n<li><b>4-September<\/b>: I haven&#8217;t been to Mt. Rainier in <a href=\"\/journal\/2002\/08\/08\/everett-washington\/\">more than a decade<\/a>, so we set off to roam around on a 14,000 foot volcano.  Mother Nature conspired to keep the mountain mostly hidden behind clouds, but &#8220;Paradise&#8221; is not mis-named, and the mountain meadows and marmots made for a pleasant journey, even if I did go all environmental nutjob and yell at a couple of foreigners who either couldn&#8217;t read or were ignoring the &#8220;don&#8217;t walk on the fragile meadow flowers&#8221; signs.  After a full day of walking up and down the steep slopes of the mountain another nice dinner was again called for, this time at our fancy hotel restaurant.<\/li>\n<li><b>5-September<\/b>: The long weekend concluded with a day spent roaming around Seattle, including a tour of the &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.beneath-the-streets.com\/\">underground city<\/a>&#8220;, created after the 1889 fire when they rebuilt the city by raising street level about ten feet, entombing the first floors of a 30 block area.  The day concluded with a trip up the fourth-tallest building in the world (or at least it was, in 1914), with the journey made in a period brass elevator that had see-through walls and a wide-enough gap between elevator and building to put the word &#8220;plummet&#8221; front-and-center as you stepped inside.  The top of the Smith Tower offered great views from an open-air, wraparound deck, and decent drinks at a speakeasy-style bar.  When we finally returned to the hotel, dinner consisted of a shared cheeseburger, since not every night needs a fancy meal.<\/li>\n<li><b>6-September<\/b>: Audrey got to sleep in before her flight back to LAX, while I set off bright and early for a flight to Spokane.  I work remote the majority of the time, so my first visit to the new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.commerce-architects.com\/\">Commerce Architects<\/a> office was a chance to finally meet several employees who I&#8217;ve worked with on a daily basis for months but wouldn&#8217;t recognize if we were sitting next to each other in the same room.  Cost of living in Spokane is significantly less than in California, so the Spokane office (located in a historic building) put the old Berkeley digs to shame, while the hotel I stayed in was on par with some of the nicer LA hotels, but about one-third of the price; with three senior partners living in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Spokane, they clearly made a tremendously sensible choice on where to set up shop.<\/li>\n<li><b>7-September<\/b>: The rest of the CA partners arrived to begin two days of company meetings, followed by a team outing consisting of a dozen people on a pedal-powered trolley roaming the streets of Spokane and visiting a couple of local bars.  Afterwards the five partners gathered for a super-fancy dinner, something that is apparently a tradition for those rare times when they all get together.  My previous lifetime best was four courses in a single meal, and over two-and-a-half hours this dinner beat that record by two.  I made it back to the hotel stuffed, tipsy, and happy about my recent career choices.<\/li>\n<li><b>8-September<\/b>: Day two of meetings included a team lunch and plenty of administrivia, after which it was time to depart for a 6PM flight back to LA via Seattle.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One week in, September is off to a roaring start.  My flight back from Spokane landed at 11PM, I&#8217;ll work a nearly-full day today, then after a glorious eighteen hours home it&#8217;s back to the airport for the next phase of the month&#8217;s adventures.  There&#8217;s just enough time to do laundry and pack &#8211; life has gone from slow to fast, and it should make for a fun month.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/photos\/images\/2016-09-A\/0565-mount-rainier-marmot.jpg\" alt=\"Marmot on Mt. Rainier\" width=\"700\" height=\"467\" class=\"img-main\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption\">Marmot demonstrating &#8220;extreme napping position&#8221; on Mt. Rainier.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After several months without much excitement, airport security will be seeing me a lot during September and October: 1-September: After the second of two consecutive work trips to San Antonio my plane returned to LAX Thursday night at about 6PM, leaving ample time to do laundry and re-pack for the next flight about 36 hours &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2016\/09\/09\/the-month-of-many-travels\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Month of Many Travels&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,29],"class_list":["post-10185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-photography","tag-recap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10185"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10207,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185\/revisions\/10207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}