‘Photography’ Posts⁽⁷⁾

i’m in baltimore for a vendor conference and i think i’m annoyed. baltimore is far enough away that we had to get hotel rooms — and to strip out just about every ounce of excitement about spending time in city other than our own.

i will say that, living in DC, i don’t “get” to wander around the streets of baltimore at night often, but that sounds an awful lot like something to be avoided — especially considering the only reason i was out was because i had forgotten contact solution and was desperately searching for a 24-hour pharmacy.

route 55 cuts through the Monongahela National Forest, taking people from Front Royal, Virginia in the east through to central West Virginia, near where my conference is being held.

the landscapes along the route are exotic — much more like rural Australia and much less like what i’d have expected being only a couple hundred miles from D.C..

i’m off for a couple of days — work is having an internal marketing conference out in west virginia for a couple of days, which means i won’t be back until Thursday.

the conference is actually at resort that is part of a west virginia state park, and isn’t too too far from Monongahela National Forest.

i’ve looked over the conference materials and there is less than three hours built into the schedule for us to actually be out in nature — which is ironic considering who i work for — but i’m taking the “good” camera for the pretty stuff on the drive out and back.

with my well known obsession for the Olympics, I just couldn’t imagine being so close to an Olympic site and not checking it out.

(although I have been to Vermont two dozen times and haven’t managed to make it to Lake Placid — a mere two hour drive west.)

i’ve been to Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, to Melbourne’s Olympic Stadium, and had near misses with Canada Olympic Park in Calgary (drove by, but couldn’t stop) and Sydney Olympic Park (saw it from the air, but only had 18 hours on the ground).

Utah Olympic Park was home to 14 of the 28 events in the 2002 Olympics, including all the sliding events (bobsled, skeleton, luge) and the jumping events (ski jump, Nordic combined).

at the park, a multiple-sport Olympian (one of them for ballet skiing, apparently) took us around to the five venues, and Terry Kent (sliding venue announcer for the last three Olympics) talked us through what it was like in Vancouver.

great experience. stunning views.

it was mainline-ing the Olympic experience to someone who’s already an Olympic junkie … something tells me it’s only going to make things worse.

i’m in salt lake city for a web analytics conference, and the views from this place are just stunning. it’s not very hard to imagine a group of people being moved to center a religion here.

I’ve got no idea how this week will go … it’s my first week way from sparklet, i dont travel for work much anyway, and hordes of socially awkward web analytics geeks make me nervous,

I’m going to try and squeeze in two quick things while I’m out here … a trip to Utah Olympic Park (site of the 2002 Winter Games) and the Great Salt Lake (seems like a good thing to see in its eponymous city).

besides that, I’ll just be missing baby … and trying to process being in a city that make Vermont look like a bastion of genetic diversity.