Travel Blogging....

It's Seattle, again. It's raining. This is actually rare for me. I have had a rather charmed life coming to the Pacific Northwest, in that it was the 6th trip before I saw any rain at all.

I had a weird flight. My power adapter in the seat didn't work. Nor did the one in the corresponding seat opposite. THe Cabin Services Director then had a chat with me and moved me to Club (yay!) where the first 2 seats we tried also didn't have power, the third had power which cut out every 30 seconds and the 4th worked. Phew! Not exactly an advert for BA service crews there.

Strangely for me, I did do about 4 hours work. A presentation, edited a report I've been thinking about for weeks and planned a few meetings. All rather cool. Then I watched "The Day After Tomorrow..." Ummm... well, it passed a few hours. I spent the rest of the trip watching Andromeda on DVD which a friend has sent me. I missed this first time, and disturbingly it's not all that bad. Lexa Doig is quite amazing as the ship...

About to have a nice lardy USian breakfast at the Mecca Cafe, then a day of meetings, followed by another day of meetings. Then I fly to San Diego for a day and then up to Vancouver. Currently I have Tuesday free, but I suspect it won't stay that way.

In other news: My house sale is going through. The mortgage for the buyer has been approved, the survey has been done, looks like we're going to complete at the end of September - which will be good, because I'm about to buy a new car.

Getting to Know a Place

I did a customer satisfaction survey on the plane over. I think it's the 4th or 5th one I've done in the last year, one of the questions is how many flights you've taken in the last 12 months, this got me to trying to count accurately and think about my travel to Seattle.

The first time I came to Seattle was for the day in September 2001 - just before 9/11 infact. A couple of weeks later the company I worked for closed the US office and I was redundant. My next trip was exactly 12 months later in early September 2002 - since then, I've been here pretty much every 2-3 months. Working out my travel for the survey, I realised than in the last 12 months I've been to Seattle 6 times - this being the 7th. I've also been to the far east, and done several flights a month to European destinations.

It's strange getting to know a foreign place well, but still be very much the vistor. I know lots of good places to have a drink and food as a single traveller or in groups - but it always amazes me that you can keep finding more places. It is also rather odd to start to know the driving routes around a foreign city - including the local rat runs to avoid traffic jams.

As we move closer to signing the next set of contracts with the "customer" the question of expanding the account looms - on the one hand it could be complicated for M to find work here, although she is speaking to the "beast" about a UK job, and the type of Visa I would get would allow her to work... on the other I do actually quite like Seattle.

Sure, the weather is like the UK but the scenary is stunning. It's also more European than any other US city I've spent time in. The food is high quality, they have a *lot* of local beers - it's actually hard here to find a standard factory generated lager. Most bars sell local homebrews which tend towards dark and heavy.

There's local wine, great fish, amazing steaks and I'm told there's good skiing.

So maybe we could live with this place. It's interesting, I'm about to cut my last real tie to the UK, my house, its about time, but I really can't clearly see what the future holds for us.