Tag: Travel

aquariums, by and large, are nasty/brutish places, over-stuffed with parents desparately trying to ignore their shrieking kids — a chaos that is the exact antithesis of the peace you see underwater.

so, while i love beautiful collections of fish in large tanks and could sit in front of just one exhibit for hours on end, at an aquarium if you stand in one place too long you are invariably jacked up against a wall by marauding tourists.

tonight, however, the conference i’m attending rented out the national aquarium in baltimore after hours for all it’s attendees. so, instead of the building being overstuffed with nasty-brutish families … it was overstuffed with nasty-brutish drunk marketers.

oy.

deflated, i trudged my way through the aquarium with some friends at a brisk page — looking at the fish here and there, but moving pretty quickly to avoid the drunken pre-hookup marketer rituals.

i fell behind my friends at one of the last exhibits and, as i finally made my way by the front entrance on my way out of the aquarium, an official looking woman with a yellow coat hurriedly waved me over.

we’re shutting down the exhibit — you better get in there if you haven’t already been through. you haven’t been through yet, have you?

“um, no … i just got here.”

i skittered on past, she pulled the rope across behind me, and for the next forty-five minutes i basically had the entire national aquarium to myself.

joyous.

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.

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..

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.

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.