Text Post | Elsewhere or bust, καιρός

We had a great, albeit, quick visit to Scotland. We flew into Glasgow from Iceland, drove up to the Isle of Skye, ran over to Aviemore, and our last city was Edinburgh. Surprisingly, we had quite a few sunny days! We really enjoyed the scenery, the people, and, especially, the cask ales. Jacquelyn was able to find a cask cider that was out-of-this-world delicious in Aviemore.

We were able to see the highland games outside of Glasgow in a very small city of Dunoon. Very, very, cool experience. We showed up to the Isle of Skye on a sunny day and had beautiful scenery. The single lane roads were tough to navigate at first but I was finally able to handle the narrow roads and driving on the wrong side :).

Here’s some things we learned:

Driving on the wrong side of the road is super tough, at first. Pulling out of Glasgow airport to drive to our first destination near downtown was an absolutely terrifying experience. The shifter is in the middle of the car and I have no coordination with my left hand!
Scotland is a few weeks from a vote on independence. It’s pretty cool to see the various political banners throughout the cities and countryside. It appears as though farmers are not big fans of independence. Maybe a subsidy related thing? I’m not sure.
Scotland has a hog-pogg of measuring systems. Speeds and distances are in imperial (miles, mph) and volumes are in metric. Weird.
Scottish sausage (think breakfast sausage) is terrible. I worked in a meat processing facility while in college and it tastes like like how the meat processing area smelled. Terrible. Just terrible.
We had mind-blowingly awesome fish and chips. Just out of this world delicious.
Driving on the wrong side of the road is already bad enough. Driving on the Isle of Skye where the two lanes (my lane & opposing traffic) drop to a single lane for both directions is insane. Buses, trucks, cars and sheep all share the narrow road.
Cask ales are the best. It makes me re-thing what I’m doing with my life and makes me want to drink only cask ales. It’s too bad cask ales are not common in the US.
The faucets are ridiculous. I guess the technology of combined hot / cold faucets hasn’t arrived to Scotland yet. Everyday we looked forward to either scolding hot or freezing cold water. No in-between.
We had very good weather in Scotland. I guess that’s not common.
Much like Iceland, gas is expensive at about $10/gal

Enjoy the photos!

Chris W.

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Over the past year and a half I spent quite a bit of time traveling for work. I had somewhere around 57 flights, not counting connections, in the last year to a multitude of different places. Between January and February I spent just over 75% of the time traveling for work. Work travel is very, very, very different than traveling for vacation, fun, or with family. For me, it came down to learning that each business traveler I come across while traveling for work is in it for themselves and, since they’ll never really ever see me ever again, there isn’t a need for them to be nice, treat others like humans, or follow generally accepted ways of behaving — like queuing up correctly in line, being polite, saying please and thank you, and so on. Once I learned that, work travel became a lot easier.

Work travel is incredibly lonely. It’s weird to think that I when I traveled for work I was always surrounded by people but was still lonely. However, none of us knew each other, none of us really wanted to talk to each other, because, well, why would we? We’ll never see each other again.

Work travel involves waiting in line for everything – in line to get on planes, in line to get rental cars, in line to get food, in line to get help for some travel hiccup. I can see why there’s the ‘fast lane’ for a lot of business travel services.

Redeye traveling is the most stupid way of traveling, especially to different time zones. It only took three or four times waking up at 3:30AM to catch a flight to the midwest from the east coast to get to my office around 9AM on a Monday for me to realize it was better to wake up at a reasonable time, show up after lunch and not be a zombie.

Work travel is expensive and the add-on fees are annoying. Companies dedicated to work travel (Marriotts, Hyatts, airlines, etc) just nickle and dime the crap out of their customers (internet fees, priority boarding fees, and so on). I found it incredible annoying. The companies can do it because their customers are generally not paying the fees.

There are really neat perks to work travel. Loyalty programs can turn out to be really neat – upgraded rooms, cars, and flights. New places to eat all the time, it’s great! New sights and sounds to experience all on someone else’s dime. Overall, I enjoyed the experience a lot but it was a pretty steep learning curve for me. I also learned that smiling and being nice to people helping me went a really long way. It seems like most customer service reps in the work travel industry are used to being screamed at or being treated poorly. Just being nice bought me better experiences.

So, I’m done with work travel for awhile. Next, I’ll be doing a lot of personal travel with my wife. It’ll be fun to see how it’s different!

I added a few photo albums of travel pictures – just pictures I took over the last year or so and why it was meaningful to me. For everyone else, it’d probably be pretty boring.

Chris W.

The cool part of work travel:

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