Up Early to Dallas

Dallas Trip #1
SJC Airport · Wed 18 Feb 2026. 6:15am.

Another week, another business trip! It's like the old days again. Where were all these trips last year, or the year before? Maybe it's just a coincidence that I have 4 trips in 6 weeks.

This trip I'm off to Dallas for a day and a half. I'm flying out early— I set my alarm to 4:45am to catch a 7:05am departure— and will spend the afternoon taking meetings remotely, then support a seminar at a major customer for a half day tomorrow. Then, back home!

A quickie trip like this to visit just one customer wasn't my first choice. My colleagues and I tried to schedule other in-person visits while I'm in Dallas. Unfortunately everyone's busy— or just doesn't want to be bothered to meet in person. In that respect it's not like the old days.

(Mostly) Settled in Dallas

Dallas Trip #2
Irving, TX · Wed 18 Feb 2026. 1:30pm.

Today I'm in Dallas. More specifically, Irving, one of its suburbs. Irving's a nice town, at least the part I'm in, with a mix of office towers, restaurants and hotels, and condos. Ah, but the trip out here took a bit of doing.

My flight today went smoothly. Even getting up at 4:45am went smoothly. I was worried it might be painful getting up that early, or that my scheduled Lyft driver might bail on me, or that I might get to the airport nice and early only to discover my flight was running 2 hours late. None of those bad things happened. And I even had a great seat on my flight when it left, on-time, at 7:05am.



I had an entire exit row to myself. Leg room and shoulder room! And this wasn't some 40%-of-the-seats-are-empty flight. It was mostly full. But thanks to Southwest's new assigned-seats policy, picking exit row seats costs extra money for people without elite status. Of course, if the flight were 100% full they'd put people in these seats for free. But this flight was maybe only 90% full, so I lucked out.

We even landed early at DAL airport. Of course, landing early meant we had to wait on the tarmac for our gate to free up. 🙄 There's no getting ahead in today's commercial aviation system. The only way to win is to fly semi-private. ...Which I'd like to try sometime. I'll see if/when it makes sense.


Taking Lyft from the airport was an odd experience. My driver called me up and yelled at me because I wasn't where he was trying to meet me. I was, I explained patiently, standing at exactly the place where the Lyft app told me to go— which was, not coincidentally, right under a bunch of signs that read "Lyft Ride App here ↴". But my driver was a 60+ male so the fact that somebody had changed the rules on him sometime since, oh, 1983, made it a thing to piss and moan about for a few minutes. 🤣

I could've hung up on him and tried another driver, but I really wanted to get going faster than canceling and starting over would take. And because I was patient with him, he eventually agreed to work with me instead of complaining I was "in the wrong spot"— which apparently was where ride apps used to do pickups, not where all the signs point today. He drove over to my spot and picked me up. I sympathized with him about "Yeah, they always seem to change the rules every few weeks"... and that was enough to put the issue to bed. We had an amiable conversation about the natural beauty of California vs. living in Texas after that.

I reached my hotel just after 1pm. They didn't have any rooms ready. That's really rare, but I accept it because it's within policy that checkin starts at 3. I stowed my bags with the helpful front desk person and walked over to an Italian restaurant a block away for lunch.

This really is a nice little corner of town with things close by & walkable. The DART light rail even has a stop a few blocks up. I'll see about getting my room again in another few minutes here as I head back after finishing lunch.