After I had finished the Cordon Bleu class at that time I thought that it was going to be just a matter of time before I was going to be back taking another class there.

This turns out to be partially true.

A few days ago I received an email confirmation of my attendance in my next Cordon Bleu class. The slight difference is that it is not in Paris this time but our own Ottawa. I know, your thinking that Ottawa is not Paris and it never will be right? True enough but one thing that Ottawa has going for it is that it is a heck of a lot cheaper to get there. Ottawa is also only three times zones different from Vancouver and not nine like Paris. This would make a huge difference for going on a 4 day course as the jet lag would be punishing for being in Paris for just a short time.

So, Ottawa it is.

As the course is coming up next month, I will post more on this thread when I get there.

Baden

I’m writing this post on the plane heading for Toronto and will connect to our final stop of Washington, D.C. where I am attending a conference. While I’m sure that Washington is an interesting place, its likely that precious little time will likely be spent exploring the city except for maybe a few hours if we’re lucky. As with most business trips, the days will be filled with conference sessions and general work-related discussions. In this case a conference on retail technology.

I think that it’s the excitement of traveling to a fun place and looking forward to tasting the local culture is where the real enjoyment comes from. When you know that youre going to a place for business (no matter how nice of a place it is), you just dont get any of that excitement.

On this trip I’m traveling with two other guys from the office and I’ve found that this will make things a lot more enjoyable. Going on business trips alone has to be the worst of the worst. Well, I guess that perhaps traveling with someone whomyou don’t like is probably worse.

When packing up the suitcase last night, I found myself stuffing more and more electronics into it. I think that on this trip I’m armed with more hi-tech equipment than I’ve ever traveledwith. Among the inventory includes my new Dell Axim Pocket PC and separate fold-out keyboard (which I’m using now to compose this), my laptop computer, cell phone and my digital camera. I’ve got to be packing at least 5-6 various cables for rechargers and interface cables with me. Considering that we’re only gone for 5 days, I’m not exactly traveling light.

We made our connection from Toronto to Washington D.C. Without too much trouble. We had to go through the usual security checks and since we were flying to D.C., they really checked through all of our carry-on luggage pretty thoroughly. All the shoes were inspected and the security people rifled through all of our carry on luggage.

We were all staying at a hotel called the Wyndham Washington D.C. The Wyndham hotel chain is pretty swank and I had stayed at one of their hotels in Dallas a few years back on another conference. While the one in Dallas was quite a nice treat, the Wyndham Washington was defiantly not their flagship location. The web site made a statement about “recently renovated” but this is really code for “really old but weve slapped on a new coat of paint and changed the carpets”. I guess I can’t really complain because Ive certainly stayed in a lot worse but we ended up visiting someone at the Renaissance hotel which is next to the convention centre and this one was certainly in a different league.

One of the things that I wanted to do as soon as I checked into the hotel room was to get online and check my email. The Wyndham advertised wireless Internet in every room and since I was packing two wireless devices I figured that this would be easy enough to get connected. As it turned out, wireless Internet is available in a variety of places that I went to in those 4 days but none of them were free. In every case you had to sign upand pay for access either by the minute, hour or day. As it turned out the hotels wireless Internet access was the cheapest and I finally got connected. This trip was the first opportunity to test out the real life connectivity issues for our upcoming trip to Italy this fall and I learned a number of lessons about how easy of difficult it will be to get online with my Dell X50 in another country. The bottom line is that it is likely that there will be no free wireless Internet access in any country that I go to but as long as I know up front what the costs are I can plan around that. The most important thing is that there is some Internet access of any type so I can things posted.

During the four days that we were in D.C., I had an opportunity to travel around the city on their Metro and it is first class. I’ve found that the subway in every city in the world that we have gone to pretty muchall work the same and Washington’s was no different.

One the last night of our trip we had a really nice dinner at a restaurant called Smith Wollensky. I’ll do a separate posting of our dining experience at this place – suffice to say that it was a great meal.

This morning before we headed back to the airport to return home we spent several hours at the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum. As I have found with other large museums like this it all end up being sensory overload but you can’t go to Washington and not see the Smithsonian. There are actually several Smithsonian museums and the Air and Space museum are just one. Overall it was a great experience and I highly recommend anyone to take the time to check it out.

Baden

You may remember that I had mentioned in my final email from France last October that I would no longer be sending out emails anymore and I’ve spent a lot of time since then building this web site. So here it is and all you have to do now is tune in with your web browser and read my updates.

However, the problem has always been the effort it has taken to get my emails actually written. Generally this has involved me sitting at some Internet café for sometimes several hours converting my hand written notes into some semblance of an interesting story. The problem I have always found is that it takes time to be creative and I usually walk away after hitting the Send button feeling that I could have written more or at least proof read the thing once before sending.

So for the past four months I’ve been thinking of a way that I can compose my journals in the hotel every night and then just do a quick connection to the Internet to send my precomposed masterpiece.

This search eventually led me to the device that I currently using to compose this posting: my brand new Dell Axim X50 (see picture above).

I’m not going to make this a technical review as this really isn’t the focus of this web site. Suffice to say the X50 runs a version of Windows called Pocket PC and with the addition of this great foldout keyboard, it allows me to type my long documents a little bit at a time each night in the comfort of my hotel room.

Once I have typed enough, my intention is to get briefly hooked up to the Internet and post it (and maybe some pictures) for the viewing public. As the X50 has built-in wireless capabilities, my first choice will be to find a wireless connection in each location that we go to. By doing some quick searches on the Internet, I have already printed out a list of wireless “hotspots” in most of the towns in Italy that we will be going to in the fall.

With any luck, I will have the next 7 months to get all the bugs worked out of things and be ready to make my first Excellent Adventure posting from Rome in late September.

Baden

(written and posted from my Dell X50)