Travel 2024 – Not a Rebound So Far

Continued from:  Travel 2024 – A Rebound?

By the middle of April, my wife and I ready were ready for another trip—this time a road trip.  We drove just 2.5 hours east from our home to spend the weekend with some knitting friends of my wife’s.  Although I don’t knit, I enjoy their company and one friend who lived in Italy for a number of years is a connoisseur cook as well as a wine connoisseur.  We arrived at our rented farmhouse midafternoon, just as he was opening some expensive Italian red wine.

After touring the house…

… and finding our accommodations most acceptable…

…we took a walk around the farm, newly planted with corn before enjoying a pleasant conversation over dinner with his excellent wine.

The next day, we drove into Dickson, TN to first visit an antique mall and then to tour the historical Clement Railroad Hotel Museum.  Our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable, and we learned quite a bit of Tennessee history, this hotel being the birthplace of Tennessee’s 41^st governor, Frank G. Clement.  Of course, I was most pleased that they also had an operating HO-scale train layout that was fascinating to me.

The layout accurately depicted the town in the early 1900s complete with the hotel in which we stood, right beside the railroad track (brown brick building in middle left).

That night, our last there, we had a delicious Italian dinner prepared by my wife’s friend along with some additional bottles of his Italian wine collection.  We were joined by some friends of his who lived close by, one of whom interestingly is a master cake baker having won numerous competitions and having been on shows with Martha Stewart and Oprah.  Along with a lively dinner conversation, we got to enjoy one of his outstanding cake creations, an award-winning coconut cake (sorry forgot to get a picture of it).

We did not travel anywhere during the month of May but then the month of June was a very busy travel month for us.  The second weekend in June, we drove up to Louisville, Kentucky for our first road trip alone in quite a while.  It was a really great 5-day trip as we took in a Mini Bourbon Trail.  I previously posted about this trip so you can get more details by clicking on the highlighted link above.

The following weekend, I was flying off to New Jersey for another site visit to my former company for whom I have been consulting.  My first surprise was walking into a brand new, shiny terminal.  It was so nice, and it reminded me of my many trips to Amsterdam walking into the spacious Schiphol terminal.  The old terminal I traveled through more times than I can number over my 35-year career looked like something from the 40s.

I spent two days at my old company’s site and did some training the first day (my fourth training session since consulting) and had some very productive meetings over both days.

A couple of the nights I was there, I had two great seafood dishes at Legal Sea Foods, a restaurant I always enjoyed eating at whenever I was teaching but had not been to in many, many years.

The first night was sumptuous salmon and the second night was delicious scallops.

On my third day, I drove 120 miles to a site my company had in Pennsylvania.  A colleague that I formerly worked with conducted some great tours of the Quality and Manufacturing site.  I had not toured a manufacturing facility in a number of years, and I was most impressed with their efficient operation and their very modern technology.  And I got to see a robot performing a complex quality test.  Not having worked in a laboratory in a long time, I could not believe how advanced the technology had become.

The next morning when I returned to the Newark airport, I was again impressed.  I could not believe how easy check in was with the advanced technology they had installed.  I was through security in under 5 minutes, which was a far cry from the days when I would spend almost an hour going through security slowly advancing in a line that snaked around in several different directions through the non-secure area of the terminal.

Then a week later, my wife and I were off on another trip.  This time, it was a road trip to St. Louis where we met our daughter and her family.  We had four full fun-filled days there, which I posted about last year (click here for more on it).

We had such a good time in St. Louis, that we decided to take our in-town granddaughter there also for a long weekend before she returned to school.  Her dad had changed jobs earlier in the year and would not have any vacation days until after she returned to school early in August.  Since we had taken summer family vacations with our son and his family for the past three years, we wanted to make sure that she felt like she had gotten a vacation.  We had an absolutely great time there with her which I also previously posted about last year (click here for more details).

     To be continued…