Every year, I attend a professional conference for IT folks that work in a specific area of the attractions industry. Every year, I’ve always left right after the conference wraps up, and I’ve always had people asking me “Why don’t you stay and hang out with us?”
So this year, I scheduled 2 days (Saturday and Sunday) after the end of things to hang out with these folks that I consider my friends. So would you like to know what my friends did to me? They all bailed!
Not that I’m really mad at them. Really, I’m not.
Today, I had a wonderful drive south along the Oregon coast on Hwy 101:
Eventually, I turned inland, winding up in Eugene. Taking I-5 north, I stopped at a rest area to check a map, and then got off the superslab and took an unknown road that ran right through the heart of the Willamette valley. That was pretty spectacular in its own way.
Yes, another lovely picture taken from a moving vehicle while I’m driving. Yes, it’s dangerous. I live on the edge, OK?
Eventually, I worked my way back to Corvallis, and visited the campus of Oregon State University for a short time. It looks like a nice enough place, but what can you tell from a half hour?
After that, it was back down Hwy 34 and Hwy 20 to the coast and supper. Now here I sit, in a motel room, with National Treasure on the tube, all by myself, writing in a blog. I had considered going back to the club where most of us had finished out last night, but the crowd is a bit young for me (you know–half my age) and the music isn’t my club music (Are there any 80s clubs left?). Besides, going to clubs where you don’t know anyone–by yourself, and at my “advanced” age–is something that’s simply too depressingly pathetic to contemplate. Besides, National Treasure isn’t really a bad movie.
I have another day to myself, and then it’s back on the great aluminum bird to wing my way east to home, family and friends. None too soon as far as I’m concerned.