Ba bum, ba bum, ba ba ba ba bum bum. Ba ba ba, ba ba bummm! Just in case you can't tell, that's me singing the theme to the TV show Dallas. We watched that show when I was a kid, but I don't remember much about it, so don't ask me who shot J.R. (totally unrelated, I once had a roommate who served a mission in Romania, and they were just getting Dallas on TV there, and so he had to learn who shot J.R. because people were always asking him about it.) Anyway, I had to go to Dallas last week (Oct 5th-8th) for some training.
I left Monday morning at 6am (you have to leave early from our airport, if you want to get where you're going before 11pm). I don't ride on enough planes to get completely bored of it, but this plane ride was kind of boring because there were too many clouds for me to see anything out the window. I got on the rent-a-car shuttle bus, and the driver promptly took us to the opposite side of the airport from the rent-a-car office. I usually don't mind the scenic route, but parking lots aren't much scenery. Eventually the driver figured out he was going the wrong way and turned us around. I got my gutless cheapo rent-a-car (the people in Dallas are fairly aggressive drivers, so I wish I would have gotten a peppier car, but I was trying to save the company some money) and went to my hotel. I had all the rest of Monday to do whatever I wanted, so I got on the light-rail and went to downtown Dallas. It looked like this.
.JPG)
.JPG)
There's this big J P Morgan Chase building that has an observation level. It was cool. Aside from the Space Needle, I haven't ever been in a building this tall. After that, I got back on the light-rail and saw a few more sights. The track goes right past the place where JFK got killed, then I was in the hood. Everyone was nice, but I didn't think it would be a good idea to act all touristy. There was a reassuringly large number of transit-cops, so I probably was just being paranoid. In fact, a cop checked my ticket, and I had a little trouble fishing it out of my pocket. The only other light-rail I've been on is in Portland, and they don't seem to care too much if you pay there, they do things a little different in Dallas.On Tuesday, my training started. It was interesting to me, but would be boring to 99.9% of this blog's readers so I won't go into it. At the end of the day, I cruised around and looked at some Malls, so I could get a few souvenirs. Wednesday was about the same as Tuesday.
My training ended on Thursday, so as soon as it was over, I went to the airport. The plane ride home was a little more interesting than the plane there. One fun thing, was that there was turbulence, and some lady a couple rows ahead of me was all nervous. The stewardess told her that as long as the crew was walking around, it was just regular turbulence, and she should just close her eyes and pretend she was on a roller-coaster. I had to change planes in Seattle, and got home, safe and sound, about 11:30.
It was a fun trip. I had a nice hotel room. All the people were nice. I was worried that it would be a hundred degrees, but it was nice and cool. A lot of my trips for work are needed because we screwed something up, so it's nice to go on one without the pressure of having to fix anything.
