Land of the Euskaltels

The last two days have been crazy. Here's a quick recap. Arrive at Madison's wonderful airport at 9 am Monday. Thanks to Chicago's wonderful weather my flight is delayed until 1, which means I'll miss my connection. So I get on the phone with the very helpful people at United's frequent flyer program and after trying to figure out how to get to Alicante, they rerouted my entire trip. It turned out okay. My layovers were a little longer (which means a little less stress, especially when connecting through Madrid) and arriving 8 hours later. And after 36 hours, I made it to the hotel just in time for dinner. That may not seem bad, but pro teams eat around 9 PM. So after some good appetizers, and okay pork dinner (I wasn't about to have fish after my last experience), and a couple glasses of good, Spanish red wine, I was off to bed by midnight.

Fast forward 8 hours (yes, I slept 8 hours). I've traveled to Europe so many times over the past year I don't really get much jet lag, but it was nice to sleep laying down, for the first time since Sunday. Breakfast was good. Bacon, eggs, croissants, and of course coffee. The coffee here is amazing.

By now you're probably wondering, is he ever going to go to work? Ah, right. After checking in with the mechanics and making sure everything is AOK, it's time to change into my riding gear and go for a spin... With the team. Right, we'll see how long that lasts.

I guess I forgot to mention that I'm at the Euskaltel-Eskadi training camp in Alicante, Spain. I'll write more later.
Sent from my mobile device

So many of you have gotten used to reading my blog about my latest worldly travels.  However, it's been a while since I got home from Hawaii and I still don't have any new travel plans.  As much as I love travelling around the world, it's also just as nice to be home.  So I think today I'll write a little about fall.  Trees turn colors, gardens get put to bed, 'cross racing, UW football games, painting my kitchen, and catching up with friends.   It's a great time of year to not be traveling.  What that also means, is that it's almost Thanksgiving, a holiday I really enjoy.  It's more than the good food, which is always great.  I like sitting back and thinking about all the things to be thankful for.  I've had a pretty awesome year thanks to so many people.

I'll try to do a better job of posting in the coming months, so keep tuning in... you never know when or where I might be sent a another part of the world.

Kona

Aloha!  After being home a week on the dot from Interbike, I headed to Kona for the Ironman World Championships.  This is our first year CycleOps is going to the race.  It's pretty amazing and hard to put into words.  I'm used to long flights, but the flight from Chicago to Maui seemed to take forever.  It's nine hours, which isn't too bad, but they didn't serve a complimentary meal.  Really?!?  After having breakfast in the airport, I had to pay like $20 for a small lunch on the plane.  Thankfully I had a good book to read.

The layover in Maui was long enough to have a Kona Brewing Co Longboard Lager, which was the perfect way   to adjust to life in Hawaii.  You can't by KBC in Madison.  Or least I haven't found it yet.  The airport in Kona is amazing.  It's all outdoors!  Baggage claim is under a huge "hut" for lack of a better word and of course there's palm trees everywhere.  Of course my baggage didn't show up, but whatever.  I knew it would eventually show up, which it did, but I wasn't going to sweat it.  I mean I'm in Hawaii, it could be worse.  My coworker arrived a little after me, we picked up the rental car, and headed to the hotel.  You'll notice I said coworker.  That's right, I actually get to work with someone on this trip.  Sweet!  The hotel in nice.  It's the Sheraton Keahou Bay.  It's pretty huge, but the views are amazing and you can watch manta rays feeding after dark from one of the bars here.  Very cool!  So we arrived Saturday night, rested on Sunday, then set up our booth on Monday and Tuesday.  We were able to get a little sightseeing in and even hit the beach for a little after setup on Tuesday.  I should mention though, that there aren't a ton of beaches in Kona.  There are still active volcanoes on the island, so the shores are mostly just lava flows.  Don't get me wrong.  It's pretty cool.  But anyway, the "beach" is about 45 minutes away and man was it nice.  Crystal clear and bright blue water, flanked by lava rocks.  Simply amazing.  The expo has been steady and it's good to talk tech stuff with the athletes.  Power is new to triathlon, so there's a lot of education involved as well.  Stuff I like doing.  As the race gets closer, the energy is starting to build.  This morning before the expo started was the Underpants run.  Yes, underpants.  Think lots of triathletes running around in their underwear.  Real underwear, men and women, kids, costumes, you get the idea.  It was definitely entertaining.  Tomorrow is the bike count.  Again, for those of you who follow the sport, everything bike related is counted during bike check in.  That means power meters, wheels, bikes, components, tires, saddles, pedals, the list goes on and on.  What that means though, is sitting in a chair staring at bikes zipping past for six hours.  I might need to set an alarm so I remember to reapply sunscreen to my close-to-bald-by-choice head.  I've already burnt my head once this trip and I don't intend to do it again.  Anyway, we went to dinner tonight at this restaurant right on Ali'i Dr.  It's the main drag through downtown and we were treated to quite an amazing sunset.  The best yet!

Well I think that's about it for now.  Oh, one more thing.  if you want to see my pictures, you'll have to find me on Facebook.  Hopefully I'll update this again before I leave, to recap of the actual race experience (from the spectator perspective, of course).  Until then, mahalo for for reading.

Interbike

So I was home five days before leaving for Las Vegas.  Ah yes, trade show season.  That means going to the desert for a few days of talking, standing, and interviews.  Yes, interviews.  Not me interviewing people, but me being interviewed by various media outlets about our CycleOps products.  Perks of being a product manager I guess.  Besides talking with dealers, etc, I was also able to walk to floor bunch to get an idea of what is cool and new in the cycling world.  Interbike is crazy.  Those of you who follow cycling know there's colors and styles for everything imaginable on a bike.  Now fill a convention hall with all that stuff and you have Interbike.  It tool multiple trips around the floor to see the things I needed to see and I still didn't see everything.  It's just overwhelming.  Show hours where something like 10 hour days, then dinner, then hit the town.  Hitting the town after all this time on your feet isn't quite what you'd expect though.  Mostly, we just checked out a few key hotels/casinos before calling it a night.  Keep in mind, we had to do the same thing the next day, so there weren't really any late nights.  It was a cool trip and I'll definitely go back on my own time.  I was surprised how much I liked Las Vegas. 

Commuting to work

So I left off with getting to the hotel. I met up with the sales guys later in the evening at the local pub for a couple beers. It was good to meet them in a relaxed atmosphere before getting to work the next morning. The next morning we got to work pretty early, which allowed for some time to have some classic English breakfast, which meant bacon sandwiches. Bacon here is like sliced ham (like you get with ham and eggs) but aged and flavored like American style bacon. Amazing! The work day was good and the weather was beautiful. We had grilled meats all day to keep the energy up, which was good to help avoid the jetlag. Work like this is typical trade show stuff, so nothing exciting. Dinner later was excellent though. We all went to a local restaurant in Thornbury and had this amazing Tapas style dinner. We're in cider country, so of course we had plenty of cider. This type of cider is for kids either... And by the way, there's a castle in Thornbury. Henry VIII used to go there with Anne Boleyn back in the day. The amount of history around here is amazing. I didn't get to see the castle, but apparently it's impressive. Anyway, it was a good day. More to come later.

England

Captain's log. Star date September 11, 2010. A day that is forever burned into our memories. Moment of silence.

Nothing exciting on the flights, but because my flight out of MSN left 30 minutes late, I had to run from Concourse E to Concourse C at O'Hare. If you don't have a map of the airport, that's probably close to a mile, with my backpack bouncing around and holding my bike helmet in my right arm. Think Heisman Trophy pose. I'm pretty sure I was the last person on the plane, but whatever. I made it, right?

Okay, fast forward through the trans-Atlantic flight. One of Paligap's sales reps picks me up and drives me to his house, where he tells me the van (think VW Sprinter) is what I'll be driving to Bristol. No problem, right? Wrong. Driving on the left side of the road is hard. Especially in a vehicle three times bigger than what I'm used to. Most cars over here are stick shift. My private car is stick shift, so no big deal right? Wrong again. Shifting with the left hand is not as easy as I thought. And they use miles per hour and yards instead of meters. Seriously? I thought Americans were the only ones who used those metrics. I've driven in Belgium, The Nederlands, France, and Switzerland over the past four months and this was the most challenging. Was it the lack of sleep or just that everything is backwards from what I'm used to? Got me. But it goes back to leaving your comfort zone. You can't grow if you don't push your boundaries. Until next time, Cheers!

It's been about seven weeks

So it must be time to travel again. This time I'm going to England. Sorry race fans, there's no racing this time. I'm headed to Bristol, which is about two hours west of London, to spend some quality time with our UK distributor. Stay tuned for more...