Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Texas Trip log #6
AUS Airport · Thu, 13 Nov 2025. 4:45pm.

It has been a busy day for me with meetings galore in Austin.

My day started with a morning alarm at 6:15. I had to get ready for the day, pack my suitcase, and be downstairs for an informal meeting at 7:30am. Luckily it was informal as I fell behind schedule— I got sucked into reading too many work emails early this morning— as I didn't get downstairs until 7:40.

Then there was an 8:30 meeting at a prospective customer's office. We were annoyingly late for that, too. When we started leaving the hotel at 7:50, maps said we'd be there by 8:20. By 7:05, as we sat in traffic, our arrival time had slipped out to 8:25, then 8:30, then 8:40. Fortunately it all worked out as it was a very productive meeting. And the customer was understanding of our tardiness as some of them arrived late because of the same bad traffic (there was an accident in a construction zone).

Later in the morning I took a meeting from a picnic table on the edge of a parking lot outside a beer bar.As I've remarked many times, working remotely isn't just "Work From Home", it's work from anywhere you can set out a computer and get a network signal!

After that I took a meeting inside the bar. It was with a customer who'd picked the bar. Though oddly I was the only one (of the six of us total) who drank beer. I drank sparingly. Then after the customer left and it was just me and my sales colleague, I hit the bottle harder. 🤣

From lunch I headed over to the airport with a stop back at the hotel to drop off my colleague and pick up my suitcase. Here at AUS I cleared security surprisingly fast considering how busy the airport is. I bought a soda as a pretext for sitting at a table in one of the food court areas then conducted two more meetings sitting in the airport food court.

Now it's rolling up on 5pm and I consider myself done for the day. I've been working since before 6am, and I've still got at least 4 more hours to go before I get home tonight.

Texas Trip log #4
Residence Inn · Wed, 12 Nov 2025. 5:10pm.

I've been in Austin all day, since late last night actually, and I'm not yet to the point where it even matters that I'm here in Austin. I spend the day today working remotely from my hotel room.



Yup, that desk by the window is where I've put in about 7 hours so far, including 4 customer-facing meetings.

Thankfully I haven't just been sitting here all day. I did go out for lunch. But after that it was back to work.

Now it's just after 5pm and I'm feeling cooked. That wouldn't be a problem if it were quitting time... but I've got a customer dinner to go to next! I'll need to wake up and be "on" for the next couple hours.

Texas Trip log #2
41,000' over Nevada · Tue, 11 Nov 2025. 7pm.

I'm not even halfway to Texas yet and already my plans for the rest of the week have changed. The customer I intended to visit in San Antonio on Friday couldn't get all of their people together on the same day. Instead we'll meet with them virtually, and probably next week. That means I should go home Thursday instead of Friday, and I don't need a rental car to drive to San Antonio.

Unfortunately this is the way enterprise selling is in 2025. Face-to-face meetings are rare anymore. Scheduling them with customers and prospects is like pulling teeth, and even once they agree to a meeting date they often renege on it. It's like nobody can commit anymore.

Fortunately I know it's 2025, not 1995 unlike a certain senior politician who seems to think "Bring back Johnny Carson [to host the Tonight Show]" is a reasonable demand. (Johnny Carson stepped down from hosting that show in 1992 and retired to private life. He died in 2005.) I anticipated that the customer in San Antonio had at least a 50/50 chance of flaking on us, so I held onto two homeward flight reservations: one on Thursday and one on Friday. I simply canceled the one on Friday. And, as I got the news of them flaking out just before boarding the flight, I was able to do that from my phone while sitting in my seat while the aircraft was still parked at the gate.

Cancelling my rental car reservation took a bit longer. I waited until I could take out my laptop computer for that. Though by the time we were 41,000' feet above Nevada I couldn't get my computer to connect to Southwest's flaky wifi. So I went through "Sorry, that username or password couldn't be found" purgatory on my mobile phone trying to pull up the booking site to cancel the car.

Day 1 of this trade show is over. I've been back in my room with my shoes off since just before 10pm. Not that this Day 1 is any big accomplishment. It's the easiest of the 3 days of this show.

Much of the day I spent flying from San Jose to Austin. The flight was uneventful, though it did fall a bit behind schedule. Then I hit some afternoon traffic getting over to the resort. In all I didn't get to the trade show floor until over an hour after the show started. But at least my room at the hotel is nice.



This is the Omni Resort Barton Creek in Austin. It's not the Omni "in" Austin, it's the one maybe 10 miles away from the city center. Out here they actually put some hills in the Hill Country of Texas.



The company running this conference generally picks nice, resort-y hotels for their events. And for me it's a bonus that it's not Las Vegas. I hate Las Vegas. It's so much more pleasant looking out the window and seeing this than seeing yet-another Strip view... or, more often, a parking garage and a freeway 30 stories below.

After working the booth for an hour in the evening shift I boarded a shuttle to a barbecue restaurant my company was co-sponsoring a dinner at. Lest you think, "Woohoo! Boondoggle!" the fact that my company is co-sponsoring means I attended as a co-host. That meant guiding people to the shuttle vans from the hotel lobby and working the room during cocktail hour to make sure nobody was left alone in a corner. (Because this is a techie conference there were several people being left alone in corners... and generally they wanted to be left alone... and generally it was better for everyone that they were. 😅) In between that and eating and drinking I had several good conversations with customers and prospects.

"Oh, you get to travel for business," I hear a lot. "You're so lucky!"

The truth about business travel for most of us is it's not the swank life in the lap of luxury you see portrayed in movies. It's life in 3-star hotels in suburban office parks, dinners at dull restaurants, and too-long days that leave no time for clubbing or sightseeing.

Take my current trip as an example. I'm in Austin, Texas this evening through Friday afternoon. You might think of Austin as a fun place to go.... "Live Music Capital of the World", bars and clubs on 6th Street, great good swank hotels downtown, etc. All those things are true but this is a business trip. None of those things are in scope.



Instead of staying at a swank hotel downtown I'm in a... tired, anonymous hotel miles away. It's surrounded by office parks. I have elite status so they upgraded me to a corner room with a balcony. Here's the view from my balcony....



Hey, look, a great view of a parking garage! And they have a light show. Yes, the colored lights on the garage cycle through a rainbow of shades. Why, I could sit here all evening watching the lights and be only... 99.8% bored. 🤣

All the great eats in Austin? We had a team dinner at a chain restaurant across the freeway. Our leaders think of themselves as so cosmopolitan and world wise, but they're from flyover country. Their idea of fine dining is going to an expensive chain restaurant.

And clubs and bars downtown? Sure, I could hop in a cab and go this evening. But this being a sales training summit, we've got a full day starting tomorrow before 8am. As I'm already facing a two hour timezone change (the 8am start will feel like 6am for me) I don't want to do anything tonight that would jeopardize my ability to lean in all day tomorrow. It'll be hard enough as it is getting up with my 6:30am alarm. It'll feel like 4:30am to me.

When I visited the Alamo in Texas a few days ago I thought a lot about how to frame what happened there in terms of a larger history. The popular story is about American heroes choosing death over defeat and the enemy's brutality making "Remember the Alamo!" a powerful rallying cry for independence. But independence from what, and why? The way those parts of the story are framed at the Alamo itself raised my skepticism because I could see the tool marks of recent politics on them. Sure, simplified us-versus-them stories are winners with most. But not with me. I wanted to dig deeper.



One way to frame what happened at the Alamo is as part of a larger independence movement in the US. Of course, Texas wasn't part of the US back then. Texas was a state in Mexico, which had won independence from Spain in 1821. But a good many of the settlers of Texas were from the United States. In fact Mexico encouraged Americans to come settle in Texas. Arguably one of the lessons is that Mexico should've known better than to invite Americans in; they'd revolt and demand independence. 😂

Politically Mexico was a mess back then. The following independence were rocky, politically, as different schools of thought and different factions collided over how to structure the national government. Some wanted a decentralized government, similar to the confederacy of the US under the Articles of Confederation that preceded the US Constitution. Others wanted a strong centralized government. And others proclaimed a third way, balancing the first two.

The 1824 Constitution of Mexico had created a federal system in which many rights were devolved to states. But over the years the central government asserted more power, including passing anti-American laws that limited immigration from the US and taxed US imports heavily. These were unpopular with the influential Anglo-American population in Texas. Mexico officially abolished slavery in 1829. That, too, pissed off the American immigrants as most of them were from the American South, where slavery remained legal, and had brought their slaves— and their view of slavery as the natural condition for Black people— with them. The final straw came in 1835 when the new president (there had been several in just a few years), Antonio López de Santa Anna suspended the constitution, replacing it with a series of articles that gave him strong, centralized power. Texas revolted, as did many other states.

One fair question is if many states revolted, why was there only fighting in Texas? One answer is that Texas was more revolting. Texian soldiers sacked some Mexican outposts, infuriating Santa Anna. In addition, Santa Anna believed the US was orchestrating the revolt against his power. He led his army to Texas to punish the American ex-pats there. Ultimately, though, when Santa Anna was defeated, no other states demanded independence, only Texas.

San Antonio Travelog #6
The Pearl - Sun, 28 May 2023, 7pm

What goes up must come down. As we went up the San Antonio River along the Riverwalk earlier today, so must we go back downriver to get home. Along the way I spotted something interesting.... One of the passenger ferries that plies this part of the river had just entered a lock. I've seen plenty of locks before... but I've never seen a ship transit one. It was time to stop and watch!


Link: watch video on YouTube

Stopping to watch the lock operate was also a good excuse for taking a rest. We've walked quite a bit today, over 8 miles by Hawk's step counter. But soon enough we're back near our hotel.



We've been staying at the Holiday Inn. It's the tall building in the background with the stepped roof. I like its location because while it's not in the middle of the action on the Riverwalk loop where all the busy restaurants and raucous bars are, it's not in the middle of the loop where all the raucous bars are. It's quiet after dark (at least once the clod blasting his stereo from his balcony wises up to the fact he's not actually the only person alive) yet still close to all the action.

Oh, but the walk isn't even done yet. There's one last little find before we reach our hotel:



There's a small waterfall (man-made) in a grotto just around the bend from our hotel. Little touches like this make the Riverwalk so much more enjoyable than just another river in another city.

San Antonio Travelog #4
The Alamo - Sun, 28 May 2023, 12pm

This morning we went to see the Alamo. You didn't think we traveled to San Antonio just to cruise the Riverwalk and would... forget the Alamo, did you?



The Alamo was built originally as a church, part of Mission San Antonio de Valera, and was constructed in the early 1700s. By the late 1700s its use as a church had dwindled, and the Catholic mission moved to another location. The remaining buildings were then used for other purposes, often as barracks for troops. It took on the name "The Alamo". Alamo is the Spanish word for cottonwood tree. There are some cottonwoods growing around the area.

The Alamo took on a new role in American history and an indelible role in Texas history in the battle that occurred here in 1836. Texans, or Texians as they were variously called at the time, were fighting for independence from Mexico. General Santa Anna led an army of thousands in to the state of Texas to quell the revolt. San Antonio de Béxar, as it was called at the time, was further west than most of the settlements in Texas, but it was a growing town at an important crossroads. An ill trained force of fewer than 200 Texians defended the fort, across the river from San Antonio.

Santa Anna besieged the fort for several days, demanding the rebels' surrender. The rebels answered his offer by firing a cannonball. "Victory or death" was their position. Equally, in response, Santa Anna raised the red flag of No Quarter. Santa Anna's forces attacked en masse in the pre-dawn hours. Every defender was either killed in action, or executed in the immediate aftermath, and their bodies burned on big pyres.

Santa Anna had hoped that winning in a complete route at San Antonio would demoralize the Texians and break their revolt. Instead it galvanized political will in Texas to fight for independence. "Remember the Alamo!" would become a rallying cry for volunteers. The Texian army, led by Gen. Sam Houston, later sacked Santa Anna's forces near San Jacinto. Santa Anna himself, not just general of the army but also President of Mexico, was captured hiding in a ditch. He conceded defeat to the Texians to spare his life.



The Alamo, once a church, has since become a shrine, a memorial to the dead who were denied proper burial.

In terms of the building itself, note that from the time of its construction through the battle for independence (and for many years after) the mission had no room. It was just walls. The light colored, domed roof you can see in the interior picture here was added years later, after Texas joined the US, by the US Army. The building has many of the features of a Spanish missionary church from the early 1700s, though all the religious furnishings were removed in the late 1700s.

San Antonio Travelog #2
Airport hotel - Sat, 27 May 2023, 10am

Last night was a late night getting into San Antonio. Our flight was scheduled to land at 1:20am. Yes, we booked that schedule on purpose! The alternative was to leave this morning and burn most of Saturday traveling out here. Even though the flight was actually a few minutes early to land, and even though we hailed an Uber quickly to our hotel a mere 6 minutes away, it was still going on 2am by the time we got settled in our room.

We arranged a 2pm late checkout when we arrived at the Marriott TownePlace Suites, just in case we were wrecked and wanted to sleep in 'til noon. Instead we got up around 9:20, in plenty of time to get some breakfast downstairs.



The breakfast room was crowded with people hacking and coughing and not wearing masks (Texas, y'all!) so I considered bringing my plate of food back to the room. But then I spied tables on the patio next to the pool. I snapped this picture (above) to compare it to breakfast in Grand Cayman (click the link to compare pics). Yeah, similar idea, very different execution. Oh, and beyond the pool is... a view of a freeway interchange.



What's next? Well, we booked this hotel near the airport because we knew we'd be getting in late. We didn't need for it to be great, just comfortable. To be fair, that pool looks like it would be a nice place to spend some time, even if the view from it is freeway overpasses. But for the next two nights we have a nicer place booked. We'll be staying at the Holiday Inn downtown right on San Antonio's famous Riverwalk. We spent up a bit to get a balcony room overlooking the Riverwalk. We'll probably check out of Freeway OffRamp Suites soon and head there.

It's been in the news for weeks that major parts of the US are suffering a blistering heat wave. Austin, Texas has seen 40 straight days of temperatures reaching 100 degrees (38° C) or higher. Meanwhile, here in the Bay Area, the summer weather is... normal. The past few weeks we've had highs in the low 80s (around 27-28° C), which is average summer weather, and more of the same is on tap all this coming week.