McGarvey’s Words
by Robert McGarvey
re: My Itinerary
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McGarvey’s Words by Robert McGarvey re: My Itinerary |
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Here's What You Are Saying: Letters to McGarvey's Words . Back Pages: o Palms Away: Travels with a Palm. o Email-Country. Of Ricky Skaggs, cruising, Yahoo, and the ubiquity of email. O Google Spying: Much ado
about something good. o Ebay and the triumph of ecommerce. o VirtualOffice: The best travel bag. o Junkmail: the war on spam.
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Yesterday I got up at 3:30 a.m., climbed in the car for a two-hour drive to Phoenix, parked, clambered aboard a plane to Oakland, rented a car, drove 25 miles to San Ramon to interview Dave O'Reilly, CEO of ChevronTexaco, drove back to OAK, flew to Phoenix, drove two hours home. Whew. Portal to portal I was gone 20 hours. As the hours ticked by I used the time to reflect on how dramatically, stunningly, crushingly different business travel is from when I first joined the club 30 years ago. That was with the American Petroleum Institute in Washington, DC and while budgets were not flush, trips were slow, even leisurely. There was no such thing as a day trip that involved an airplane. Get on a plane going anywhere and, instantly, that also meant a hotel stay. There were nice restaurant meals, a lot of them. A couple drinks in the bar.... Or, more exactly, many drinks in the bar. Those were hard-drinking times a quarter-century ago and I recall many, many long stops in bars with co-workers and bosses. A regret I have is that in those years we rarely ventured out of the hotel except for business meetings. I would drop into Seattle or Dallas or Chicago and the drill was always the same: hotel, bar, a restaurant in the hotel, meetings (often in the hotel). I have never taken the elevated in Chicago, eaten good BBQ in Texas, poked around Chinatown in Vancouver, gone fishing off Florida's coast, or aimlessly driven the backcountry roads of West Virginia. Always, when I have been in those places, there were tight agendas with little room for personal explorations and, if there was any free time, it was late at night and I would join my bosses, Arne and Hal, in the bar for a nightcap. That was the way of the road that they taught me. I should have been more suspicious. Arne died before he hit 50, Hal departed before 60, and therein is written a terse epitaph on that way of business life on the road in the 1970s and 1980s. I enjoyed myself, make no mistake, because these were grand men to hang around with -- smart, witty, educated (Hal even had a Ph.D. in English but he had a posse of kids and couldn't support them on a professor's salary so he became a speechwriter). But I would not want to re-live that lifestyle on the road, not in the 21st century. If I could...I would have written into my personal script a greater exploration of the towns I was staying in. In memory one hotel blends into another and that one blends into a third as the sameness is comforting, no doubt, but also stultifying. The old joke -- if it's Tuesday it must be Belgium -- might have been about bus tours but, truthfully, I have never had less of a sense of where I was than in those days of too much time in business hotels where the Chicago mattress looks exactly like the Los Angeles mattress and does it matter if I had forgotten where I was? Finally I had had enough and, about a dozen years ago, I made myself a promise and that is that I would build into every trip an experience of something uniquely, distinctively local to the destination. I would get out of the hotel and my meetings, at least for an hour or two, and do something special. Like what? Eating a grinder in Boston, touring Betsy Ross's house in Philadelphia, stopping into the Poe museum in Richmond, walking the Trinity College campus in Dublin or Queens University in Belfast, looking at the kachina collection in Phoenix' Heard Museum, strolling along the banks of the Raritan River in New Brunswick, NJ. Every town, I had come to realize, has something to offer the traveler, something that enriches the experience and leaves me feeling happier, smarter, and grateful for the chance to travel. But now in the last couple years there's been a seismic shift in travel rules. Trips are much more hectic. Day trips to distant cities have become routine. So have trips that take in six distant cities in five days. Finding even a few minutes for personal enrichment has become a challenge as business itineraries have become downright savage. But, you know what, as I reflect on my trips past and look to my trips future, I am ever more persuaded that this much is true: I am crazy if I don't continue to live by my resolution to find special, local reasons to justify business travel. Even on blistering, 20-hour days filled with tensions and ansgt. Maybe especially on those days because that is when we most need reminding why we are on the road. Next month I have another hectic Tucson-Oakland day trip scheduled...and next month I will reinstate my personal rule and do something special. Even if it is only for an hour. That is the one sure way to maintain sanity in a business travel world that is ever more insane. Do you have favorite local pit-stops? Tell us and we'll post your best emails here. That way we'll be traveling smarter. Here's one to start you off: In Tucson, take time to drive a few miles south to Pico de Gallo in South Tucson (2618 6th Ave, 520-623-8775). Humble. Simple. Cheap. A uniquely Tucson taco stand. But this is spectacular Sonoran cuisine. Don't miss the Pico de Gallo -- here, slices of fruit enlivened with chili powder -- or the coctel de elote, a zesty corn chowder. Detour for 15 minutes off the 10 FWY on the way to or from the airport and you are here. Want to keep reading McGarvey's Words? Sign up for Joe Brancatelli's weekly email notification of new travel columns that have posted. McGarvey's Words usually posts every other week, except when it doesn't. How to get this update? Just send Joe a blank E-mail and Joe will sign you up personally. Click here to visit Joe Brancatelli's Travel Site JoeSentMe.com Keep coming back, for more of McGarvey’s Words. Copyright 2003 by Robert McGarvey Taos Land Sale: Click For Details
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Have a cruise complaint? File it with Porthole Magazine's Ombudsman. McGarvey on Publishers Marketplace: Brain Wars About Robert McGarvey Author of How to Dotcom (Entrepreneur Press), McGarvey is writing a book on Brain Wars, the rise of cognitive science and the search for truths about thinking. A onetime columnist for BizTravel.com, he is a frequent contributor to dozens of magazines, ranging from American Legion to Electronic Business, Technology Review, and Rutgers. He has also contributed to Harvard Business Review. For the past five years, he has served as "The Ombudsman" for PORTHOLE Cruise Magazine. Still curious about McGarvey? Read up on him here. |
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