I’ve been in Indianapolis for the last week conducting a training class that I spent the last 3 months developing. Today is my last day in town, and after we wrap up hopefully about 3pm, I’ll be pointing my tomato-colored Mazda west and getting the hell back home.

There are things I rather like about travelling for business, particularly when I go someplace, you know, interesting. I had a trip to Towanda, PA a few years ago that was actually pretty fun. It involved flying from Chicago to Pittsburg, then taking a puddle jumper to Elmira, NY (an airport with 4 gates) and renting a car to drive the final 100 miles. I timed the trip so I was there when the leaves had turned, and it was a beautiful drive. Towanda was one of the few places I’ve ever been where I had to "drive to the big hill" to get my cell phone to work, and when I told the pizza place I’d be paying by credit card, they actually laughed at me. It was fun, at least in small doses.

Then there was the trip to San Francisco I took while I was consulting for Kraft. I was booked into this really swanky hotel, one of those ultra-modern places where the chair for the desk looks like any of a number of things, none of which are a chair. At the hotel bar, all the tall, skinny brunette waitresses wore precisely the same little black dress – or at least so it appeared to the untrained eye. Very nice scenery, but it did make it difficult to determine who I should be asking for another round. At one point when I was asking for the check one night, the random woman I flagged down said, "And who was your waitress, honey?" My response: "Um….the pretty one with the vacuous smile." I was waiting a while before I was able to settle up and get out of there.

I’ve also taken business trips to Dayton, Cleveland, New Orleans, Tampa, Atlanta, Madison, Indianapolis, Reston VA (just outside Washington DC), St. Louis, and probably a few others I’ve forgotten about. I don’t travel that often, but often enough that I’ve become very happy that I didn’t take a job I was offered a couple of years ago, which would have paid incredibly well but required that I be on the road, training about 85-90% of the time. I’d rather look forward to travelling for work as something a little out of the ordinary rather than the normal course of action. If I was on the road that much for work, what would I do for a vacation, after all? I certainly wouldn’t want to GO anywhere, would I?

Some trips have been fun, others interesting (another ‘highlight’ of the trips to San Francisco and New Orleans were that they were the two spots my ex-wife and I took major trips to; in the case of New Orleans it was our honeymoon. Still great towns, but a little odd the first time back to both of them), and others have been reminders of why I like being at home. Someplace where, for instance, a "nice restaurant" might involve going someplace you haven’t heard of, rather than a chain that you see on every city block. Or towels and linens that aren’t bordering on painful. Or waking up in the morning without wondering, "Where in the hell am I again?"

My next trip is in a couple of months, and will almost certainly lead to another odd bit of rambling. I’ll be flying from Chicago to Dayton on a Sunday, training for 2 days and then flying to Atlanta on Tuesday night, training there Wednesday-Saturday and flying to Tampa, relaxing on Sunday and then training Monday-Saturday there and finally coming home. For now, though, I have a 7 hour session to wrap up, a box of leftover training supplies to throw in my car, and a stash of Christmas gifts that have been delivered to my apartment to pick up and wrap.