Early in my career, I had to travel a lot. I was working for a financial technology company. A bank or credit union would buy the software, and I would travel to the customer’s location. These were mostly really small banks, with maybe only a few branches, in small towns.
Getting to them was an entire production, often involving a flight to a major airport, then renting a car and driving for a few hours. I started working for the company in 2006, before the iPhone. Heck, I wouldn’t even own a smartphone for another four years.
As such, I had to carefully prepare how to get around. I’d print stacks of Mapquest directions. Airport to hotel. Hotel to bank. Exploring the city was too risky (what if I got lost)? But there usually wasn’t much to see anyway. Food was limited to whatever was in my line of sight between the hotel and the bank.
I traveled heavily for about three years. Once I had my first baby in 2009, the company changed its overall method of delivering training to a web-based approach. My boss realized that she wouldn’t be able to retain a lot of the company’s talent with roles that required 50% travel. After the change, I only traveled a few times per year.
The towns I visited were sometimes so small that there were only a few main roads. Even so, I simply wasn’t brave enough to explore. I’d get done working for the day, grab a sandwich from Subway, and collapse in my hotel room with CNN and my laptop.
I thought about this while I was in San Francisco this past week. I bounced all over the city, relying on a combination of Google Maps, Waymo, and public transit. I looked at Yelp reviews of local restaurants, eager to try a little dive dinner in Haight-Ashbury or a walk-up dim sum place in Chinatown.
I wonder about everything interesting I probably missed in these small towns. Navigating the roads, restaurants, and landmarks was just so different back then.
On one of my first trips, as a new employee, I was headed to western Kansas from the company’s headquarters in Topeka. Another employee was with me to show me the ropes of working on-site at a customer’s location. He drove, and we sat in silence for most of the trip. We barely knew each other and had little to talk about (though we later became friends). He would often call his girlfriend on his cell phone and talk to her for hours at a time while I sat, listening to his half of the conversation.
We were driving along the roads of Nowhere, Kansas, when he announced that we were taking a detour to visit the world’s largest ball of twine. There was nothing I could do but agree. We got out of the car and walked around the “landmark.” In today’s world, I would have been snapping photos. But back then, I didn’t have a smartphone, and it never occurred to me to bring a digital camera on my trips.
Part of me is sad that I have no documentation of my travel. I never wrote anything down, even though I experienced a lot. The only time I took photos was when I was sent to Kalispell, Montana, and planned ahead to visit Glacier National Park.
I don’t even remember what the world’s largest ball of twine looks like... only that we made the stop.
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