Average Jane, Frequent Flyer

I just returned from a very productive business trip to Wisconsin.  For those of you keeping score, that's two trips in less than a week.  And yes, I'm pretty tired.

I zipped through airport security just fine on both trips, so apparently I look less suspicious when I'm traveling alone than when I'm with my husband.  It probably helped that I'm perfecting the Air Travel Uniform:  business casual attire with easily removed shoes, no belt, underwire-free bra and no jewelry. 

Speaking of traveling alone, I couldn't help noticing that I was the only woman in the hotel restaurant at breakfast yesterday.  When I entered the mostly empty restaurant, I randomly chose a seat toward the back.  As I drank my coffee and ate my flavorless, rubbery scrambled eggs and greasy toast and hash browns, the front of the restaurant filled up with groups of men in suits, but the only other women I saw throughout the entire meal were the servers.  Maybe all the other women in the hotel knew better places to eat!

I had an all-day meeting, so I didn't get the chance to bring home any cheese curds or other Wisconsin souvenirs.  At the rate I'm going, it would bankrupt me to try to bring something home from each trip anyway.

As far as I can determine, I'm through with travel for the time being.  I have a fiendish amount of work to do at the office, so let's hope I can get most of it under control before I set foot on another plane.

These two trips are the first I've taken with this job, although I used to travel quite a bit for another company (mainly to do grueling trade shows).  I find that business travel is often more satisfactory than leisure travel because your expectations are more limited.  What do you think?  Do you have any interesting business travel fiascos to report?

Comments

[Cagey]

There's not enough room for me to detail all the fiascos I have encountered over the years traveling for work. The one thing that always frustrated me was when my non-traveling friends would say "Have fun in !". I had a few friends who could never fathom that I was actually traveling for WORK and there was NO FUN to be had. Out of the 16 destinations I went to last year, I only "had fun" on about 3 of them - they were all trips that bled into the weekend anyway, so I was still using my own darn time to even have that fun! While I am appreciative of the fact that I have seen so much of the US over the years on various employers' dimes, I can't say it was all that fun.

[Daisy]

I agree that those who haven't travelled regularly don't appreciate how tiring it can be. I used to travel a lot around Europe, half the time waking up to a (non automated) hotel alarm call not knowing which language I needed to answer the phone in.

Worst fiasco? Without doubt the time in Germany that a client rented a house for me for a couple of months, thinking (rightly) that I'd prefer it to a long hotel stay. Except that the basement and master bedroom of the house contained hideous nazi memorobilia, a shrine to the owner's dead SS officer father.