a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Thursday’s trip home from Denver went without a hitch. There was a shortage of Yellow Cab taxis at Seattle airport, though. The driver told me that they are sometimes kept away from the pick-up points, and then three or four flights arrive at the same time.
I had a window seat this morning and slept all the way to Denver. There was snow in the city and at the airport on Friday (it’s early for snow here), but not a trace of it remained by this morning.
This picture is from Thursday’s taxi ride out to Denver airport. I looked up, and there it was : a cobalt blue horse out on the plains – so out of place it looks like an alien creature. Turns out it has been there for five years already, and despite criticism is likely to stay, as NBC’s Today website reported here.
Here’s Denver depicted in Starbucks coffee mug format. There is snow for the mountains in the forecast for Friday, prompting speculation that some of the Colorado ski resorts may open earlier than usual this year.
The week, that had me in and out of three hotels and three cities, is finally done, and I’m leaving the maple leaf country.
I need to get a Nexus card to speed my way through customs here. My US Global Entry credentials is not enough. One would think that it’s good enough, but no : you get through the US Customs in a jiff, then the Canadians that handle the airport security line say no! we don’t care. Go stand in line with those 300 other people for security. Ha!
We did our thing all day in several one-hour work sessions with the effort to win the contract for a big gas utility. All told, we pulled together 31 hours of presentation material last week and last weekend – no mean feat. We packed it in at 5.30 pm and made it into Toronto shortly before 9 pm. My colleague and I will stay over and go to the PwC Toronto office tomorrow. We have to send out an updated set of documents to the prospective client.
It was quite a journey from Denver to Detroit and into Canada. I got into Detroit at 10.00 pm, and had to navigate to the city and the Ambassador Bridge into Canada and on to the little town of Chatham where I’m meeting my USA colleagues and PwC Canada colleagues tomorrow. I pulled up at the Holiday Inn Express at exactly midnight local time in my rented white Chevy Impala.
Our project office is on Sherman street in a bland office building in downtown Denver (it is modern inside, and I am not complaining about that) .. but check out this spectacular building in the Moorish Revival style right across from it. (Confession : I had to look up the building’s style on line, I’m not that smart about architecture). I guess the days of building in red brick and in the Moorish Revival style are gone for good? All the more reason these buildings should be protected from the wrecking ball.
DIA stands for Denver International Airport. Back in the ’90s when the newly opened airport had trouble with the baggage carousels, a sarcastic newspaper heading read : ‘DIA is DOA’. I did not get a rental car for this trip – so it was great to just sit back in the taxi. It’s been a blue sky and cool weather week; a welcome respite for the Boulder residents that have to clean up after the flooding.
The ‘Wild Bangkok’ Thai restaurant
here in downtown Denver is nicely decorated inside .. and they serve up frosty Singha beers in Singha mugs. I was on my own : a welcome moment of respite after a long day of talking to lots of people. I enjoy the cold beer while the summer is still lingering before its final goodbye. It was a day of sunshine here, welcome weather after the historic 100-year flood in the Boulder area that destroyed some 120 homes. The roads around Boulder are extensively damaged, so much so that people have to be airlifted out.
I had to get up with the early birds (or even before them) for my early flight out to Denver. At least I got some sympathy from my project manager here in Denver when he learnt I took the 5.15 am flight. ‘Whoah! There should be a law against that – for flights to leave that early’, he said.
We had Seattle weather all week in Denver (rain), and Colorado weather in Seattle, I think. (Wednesday’s high in Seattle of 93° F/ 34°C was a record high for this time of year).
On the drive out to Denver airport this afternoon, some off ramps from the freeway were closed due to standing water, or flash flood water. The flooding is worst in Boulder, not too far northwest from the city of Denver.
I made my very early start, waiting at 4 am for the TSA to open their security lines, boarded at 4.40 am, and arrived at Denver airport 9 am local time. Got the rental car (you have to wait for a shuttle bus that goes to the rental car lot), and drove into the city. It’s a good 40 min drive to the offices, and my Google Map’s turn-by-turn directions led me astray. So by now it was 11 am. Our project manager introduced me to about 30 people, and I sat in four meetings, which made for a very long day – but it’s very nice to have the whole Denver downtown to explore. And hey, I have a shared office and they had my computer all set up.
My ‘Thinking in Numbers’ book has arrived, and I think I will like it a lot from what I have read so far. I have to make it an early night because the flight leaves frightfully early (5.15 am) in the morning. I am going to Denver – and yes, I know I was just there for my stopover back from Toronto! My new project is at an oil company headquartered in the city. The last time I helped an oil company convert their information systems to SAP in was in 1999. The crude oil price at the time dipped down to $18 a barrel. These days it sits at $110 per barrel and is heading higher.
When traveling back to the USA from Canada, all the customs formalities are done in the Canadian airport, before one even sets foot in the USA. My Global Entry accreditation that I did for my trips to China is still valid (it is $100 for 5 years), and it came in handy today. I could bypass a very long line at the passport control by scanning my passport, looking into the camera, and providing four fingerprints. I was very tired, and the flights felt very long : one to Denver (3 hrs) and one to Seattle (3 hrs).
So there we were Friday, seated up in front facing a panel of about fifteen client team people listening and looking at to our presentation for 45 minutes (I only did 4 of the 26 slides). Then there was an Q & A for the next hour and 15 mins. We were not perfect (who is?) but we think we did well. We stumbled on one question, and was a little too vague on one or two others. So we shook some hands, and piled into the van back to Toronto. We felt good about our effort .. but for now it is out of our hands. I stayed over, only going out to Seattle on Saturday morning.
My travels on Tuesday went without incident. I stopped over in Chicago; and made it through Canada’s customs at Toronto airport without getting sent to the ‘problem with passport’ checkpoint (even though I have a US passport now, they black-marked me for ‘trying’ to get to the Canadian side of the Niagara falls in 1995 with my South African passport). Of course there’s French everywhere. Fin de trottoir, goes the French for ‘end of walkway’ in the airport, for example. I only arrived at the hotel in downtown Toronto after 10.00 pm. It’s always a challenge to get a decent bite to eat at that time on a week night, but there was a Tim Horton’s (Canada’s more-or-less equivalent of Starbucks, a fast casual restaurant known for its coffee and doughnuts) open right by the hotel.
So here are ‘real’ pictures of the State Park. I jumped at it last night when we got back to the hotel, and drove out there. I only had my cell phone with me, but it was good enough to take some pretty spectacular pictures. It was very dry and very warm (99 °F/ 37°C), but there is a musty, salty smell in the air close to the water. There are ‘beaches’ and campgrounds in the park, and some hiking trails. I think one needs a shower after swimming in the Great Salt Lake, though! (The beach that I stopped at, had showers).
Our Marriott Courtyard hotel is in Layton, between Salt Lake City and Ogden. It’s on Antelope Drive. We leave the hotel too early to get breakfast or even coffee in the morning, so we checked out the Starbuckses closest to the hotel. The two green balloons at the top right is where we are, on Antelope Avenue. That’s when I noticed there is an Antelope Island in the Salt Lake; turns out the whole island is a State Park. So now I have to find time to drive out there on the water with that ‘Syracuse’ road to go and check it out. Google Maps is always there to provide a preview, of course (and spoil the fun of discovering it for real a little bit. We live in the information age and nothing seems to be completely hidden away anymore!).
It is 6 am on Monday 
morning at Sea-Tac airport and I am in the ‘Sky Priority’ lane to try to get in ahead of my fellow passengers.
How did I get to be a Delta ‘Sky Priority’ Platinum member, since I have flown mostly on United the prior year? Well, you apply for a ‘status match’ with your new airline. Your new ‘preferred’ airline grants you a temporary elite status* match for three months to see if you are actually bringing them enough flying to justify your temporary status. (If you don’t, your elite status disappears and you have to earn it the hard way with a full year of flying enough miles). So while my new Delta Platinum status did not get me upgraded to the luxe first class seats this Monday, it did help me get out of the middle seat in the back of the airplane to a seat further up to the front on the aisle, and with more legroom.
*Please don’t be too jealous of my ‘elite’ flying status. All it means is that I fly a lot, and that I sometimes Iuck out and sit in front of the plane !