Trips to conference are sometimes pretty interesting and sometimes uneventful. In 2005, the year of Katrina, the conference was in Birmingham, Alabama. I drove from Bridgewater to New Orleans to visit my daughter just two months after the storm. Driving across the old Route 11 bridge over Lake Pontchartrain past houses, autos, and buildings that had been swept off their foundations and covered with debris and driving through the city to the garden district was one of the most poignant and emotion-filled journeys of my life. After a visit of a day and a half, I collected my daugher Jessica and we attended the conference together.
The trip home from that conference was one of the most beautiful drives I can remember. In the South, the leaves had just reached full color and the mountains of Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia were incredible that year.
This year's trip was of the uneventful nature. Because we're here near the West Coast (on the sunny side of the state), the trip took about 15 hours from the time I left Bridgewater until I arrived at my hotel in Spokane. I drove to Dulles, stopped over in Denver and then on to Spokane. My good friend from the Virginia Highlands Chapter, Gretchen Jensen, had already arrived and texted me at Dulles before the plane left. I'm sure we'll meet up at the conference along with many old and new friends. Early birding, is what I've been doing for years and Gretchen has caught the bug too. We'll spend 3 days exploring the town before conference starts.
I'm rooming again with my travel mate and good friend, Michael Nichols. We'll sleep in tomorrow morning and then go out on the city and see what we can find. One interesting new twist to the trip this year.... I flew paperless. I used my iPhone as a boarding pass. United sent a bar coded boarding pass via email that I was able to scan in at the airport to get through security and to board the plane at the gate.
No comments:
Post a Comment