One Night in Austin

Hello and good morning!

I am now as far as I know back to my normal routine. Today is my first day in the office at work in a month… I am not sure how I’ll get through the day, it's going to be a little rough.

The past month I have been back home to the North East of England visiting my family and friends. I had such a great trip, normally when I go back I only really see my family, this time I got to see friends too, some of whom I haven’t seen in about 10 years or more. I also was able to see some of the UK I haven’t seen before, as well as some of my old haunts.

Last week, I was supposed to be at a conference in Austin. The conference is called Out and Equal Workplace Summit. The purpose of this conference is to bring together people from different companies, to share best practices for creating a safe and equal work environment, with the focus on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. Unfortunately as Hurricane Ike was headed to Texas, I was only there for one night. The company I work for made a decision to send us all back home to our families and far away from the path of Hurricane Ike.

I’d caught the early flight from Portland to Austin, which had required me getting out of bed at 12:30am Austin time. By the time we knew we were going home it was about 10:30pm. We were to call emergency travel to get our flights changed. I suggested, been as we only had one night left, that we meet at the bar in the hotel then head out to Austin for one night, and see the city. So, by 11:30 we were headed to 6th Street. We picked a pub, went in, had a drink and a dance, then headed to the next bar, this time down on 4th Street. It was a really cool place, of course I don’t know what it was called. The dance floor was outside, and the band was fantastic. We were then getting a little peckish, so headed to a pizza stand, grabbed a slice of pizza and headed to our final bar of the night. It was a whirlwind pub crawl, but at least we got to see some of Austin. By the time I got to bed, it was about 3am, my alarm was set for 6am, as there was an employee meeting at 7am. I was sharing a room, so we both needed time to get ready.

Normally, I am quite a morning person, Thursday was an exception, the alarm went off, and I felt like throwing it across the room, I didn’t even feel like I’d been asleep. I however dragged myself up out of bed, took a shower, brushed my teeth, dried my hair and got dressed, all with my eyes still closed. Once ready we headed to the meeting, and received our instructions for the day and shared our flight info. It was then, thankfully breakfast time, and then we headed off to our company booth. I normally attend workshops at this summit, but I couldn’t face sitting down, paying attention for 90mins, I most likely would have fallen asleep. Instead I worked the booth, chatting, mingling and networking with people. It was actually quite fun.

Our flight left in the afternoon, so around 3pm we made our way to the airport, and our way home to Portland. Our connection, was via Phoenix… where apparently there were some cross winds, so the airport was closed for 1hour… this of course happened as we were scheduled to land, so instead of landing, we circled around for an hour or so, finally snagging a landing time once the airport was re-opened. We then had a 5 min dash across the airport to make our connection, which thankfully we did. By the time I got home it was about 2:30am Austin time… it was sleep deprived couple of days and I was thankful to be able to go to sleep in my own bed, and not have to get up early in the morning. I slept like a baby.