Seattle August 2013

Seattle 2013.  My first extended trip without my better half.  What happened?  We were in a huge fight and…Not really.  I had a work conference.  I’ve been travelling more for work related reasons lately and that trend looks to continue increasing.

The COPRI Ports 2013 Conference was located in Seattle this year.  It only happens once every three years, and the next one will be located in New Orleans.  So no fun work related travel courtesy of the Ports Conference until 2019.  But work agreed to send me and my coworker/supervisor to this conference, and I was in.

The conference itself was fine.  It was kind of surprising in that some of the things I thought would be interesting were not…and some of the things I was least interested in ended up being the best topics.

Other than the conference, I tried to experience as much of Seattle as possible, but it was still very different than my ordinary vacation.  There were conference things during most days and semi-work related stuff at night.  Still here is my initial take on Seattle:

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Napa – October 2013

Back to Napa for trip #3…Our first trip since returning home from our big trip.

This was – as is the usual for our domestic trips – a quick long weekend vacation.  We left on Thursday—at 5:00 a.m.  I was not even aware that flights left New Orleans that early, but they do.  The good thing about heading out that early is that we got nearly a full day in on that day, as opposed to losing a day to travel.

We flew United with a stop in Houston on the way over, and it was pretty uneventful.  One thing of note is that flight was the last one we’ll take that we had to power down our phones/ipads…at least domestically.

And because there is no other better place to mention it, I’ll do so now.  We detoured to Muir Woods before making our way to Napa.  This is a redwood forest with some walking paths and trails.  Having never been to such a place, we enjoyed the stop and considered it well worth the 45-60 additional minutes of driving.

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