Where in the world is . . .

January 20-24, 2014

Minneapolis (Edina), MN

Travel for a class - only a two day class.  Two days is long enough in Minneapolis in January.  Don't get me wrong, I like Edina.  But this has been a particularly hard winter for them.  Not because of so much snow, but because it has been so cold.  But before I talk about that, I should get to the fair metropolis.

My flight to Minneapolis left Denver almost 3 hours late.  It was not because of weather in Denver.  It was not because of weather in Minneapolis.  Our plane was delayed coming in from Madison, Wisconsin.  Such a delay meant I finally got to my motel at 1:00 AM.  And yes, now we can start talking about the cold - it was -5 when I reached the motel.

The first day of class was - interesting.  Renee Brown, the administrator in the Edina office had  the laptops that were shipped in all set up.  All I had to do was set up the software on the ten systems.  This was not a problem - except for one system that simply would not boot.  The solution was to ship another system in from Wilsonville that got there the next morning.  It didn't help for the first day of class, but one student said he didn't care to do the first day's labs anyway.  Otherwise the class went very well.

The first day, the temperature got up to 1 degree and about 5:00 it started to snow a little bit.

Day two started really slow for the class.  The snow , which amounted to a little more than a very slippery inch, really messed up the highways.  All the class members finally made it safely to class by 10:00.  One of the interesting things about this class was that they loved my stories - 14ers, Frozen Dead Guy Days, Mike the Headless Chicken, the Henderson Glory Hole.  One guy said, "I came for the knowledge, I stayed for the stories."  We finished about 4:30.

High temperature for the day was 5 degrees.

One of the nice things about Edina is that the motel where I stay has an indoor running track so I was able to get some good exercise.

Now for the flight home.  I got to the airport and the temperature was -15, with a brisk wind.  Minneapolis is a good airport for walking  so I went for an airport walk.  While Walking I saw John Burke, another Mentor employee from Longmont.  He said he was there with John Parks, also from Longmont.  We were all flying home on the same plane.  And we all got upgraded to First Class, and that was very fortunate.  We got on the plane right on time.  We pulled back from the gate right on time.  Then we pulled back into the gate.  Seems a generator light lit up and it needed to be fixed.  That took an hour - a clod hour because they had to turn off the heat in the plane to fix it.  Then, just before we were to push back from the gate, they noticed something dripping.  So we sat for another hour while they fixed that.  It was not a big deal for me becasue I was comfortable in First Class, but others were a little bit less happy.  And almost everyone on that flight was making connections in Denver, and with a two hour delay, they all missed their connections.

So that was my first trip of the year.  May I say I do hate traveling in the winter.