Everything In Between

This past week, business took me into the town (city?) of Bethesda in Maryland. As it turns out, this is remarkably close to Washington DC. It’s a mere half hour to Dupont Circle on the Metro. This worked out extremely well, because Sara wanted to visit a friend who lives there now and so we were able to spend two nights in Washington DC together.

The first night we went out for our classic wander-and-dinner faire, scoring Indian food and some wine blocks away from Dupont Circle, which has road-trip of SUmmer 2005-specific memories regarding broken escalators. The second was a lovely dinner at her aunt, uncle, and cousin’s house in one of the residential areas by Foxhall street. I even got to grab a third dinner with her at the restaurant in the back of Kramerbooks on Thursday night. (I didn’t even realize there was a restaurant in there.)

This was, by far, the best business trip ever. It was also the first business trip I took that landed me in any kind of decently-sized metropolitan area. Trips like this were precisely why I was originally excited about this job’s travel requirements.

Unfortunately, however, it appears I’ll end up local (that is, in Jersey City) for what is slated to be “at least 6 months or so,” according to one of the managers. This is either a really good thing if the opportunity to learn and grow presents itself in an environment I can do that in, or a really bad thing if the opposite occurs. I’m a little nervous about the potential for the latter.

It would be unfair to my previous post, however, if I didn’t mention that even the work week (and the Monday holiday spent working) was not entirely unpleasant. I learned a ton because I got to do things new to me and had several fellow employees to serve as extremely helpful (and gracious) technical resources that helped me out. And there were no customers present the whole time–everyone seems to get more uptight around the presence of customers, which makes sense.

Anyway, all in all, I find myself craning my neck back at Union Station as the train starts moving away from Washington DC. I’d love to come back here on another trip, and I’m glad I got the opportunity to spend a week–and some much-needed time with my girlfriend–there this past week.