Tag: Work Travel

Headed to Morocco

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

Later this month, my J-O-B is sending me to Morocco for 3 days/4-nights. I haven’t been there since Laurel and I went in 2008 for our anniversary. That was a relaxing trip: Palatial riad, going out, romantic dinners, the beach, camels, etc… This trip will be a good bit different: Budget hotel, meeting after meeting all day, e-mails/drawings/spreadsheets at night, hasty meals, and early flights. I do get a free Sunday afternoon the day I fly into Casablanca, so I am headed right to the old Medina Market and plan to do a little gift shopping for my wife and all the birthdays coming up.

We sort of have a Moroccan/Sherlock/Boho thing going for our home deco and I am going to take the opportunity to pick up a few small things for the house while there this time:

  1. A 3-4 meter long meter runner for the living room
  2. A  very small rug for our entryway
  3. A few small tiles to make into coasters
  4. A leather pouf foot stool
  5. Some throw pillow covers – as many as I can carry back actually
  6. A couple of small tajines
  7. Slippers for my wife

Needing to Catch Up…

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I have been out of pocket the last couple of months and just haven’t found the time to post anything. Home repairs/maintenance, a really long sleepless trip to China for my J-O-B, local elections, the presidential election, deadlines and long hours at work, laziness, etc… have claimed all my waking hours.

I am spending the weekend with my lovely wife getting the house and yard ready for winter, drinking coffee, unclogging drains, and wading into my long neglected to-read piles of books beside the bed and in my office. I will take a couple of hours and finish some long ago started posts, organize some pictures and work on drivenoutside a little. I have some AMAZING pictures from China, a hysterical Brodie-related story to share, a few shop projects complete, some nice shots of our fall garden harvest, a long overdue trip report from a summer trip with The Ruminator, 7-8 videos highlighting thing that are hand crafted and a couple that are just beyond words that I will post.

The Alaska Airlines iPhone App is the Shiz-nit!

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I have been out of touch and away from my blog for a month or so: lots of travel including a 48hr trip to Ireland, a climbing vacation with the boys, a couple short trips to SoCal, and 5 days in the English countryside on a tour of round-a-bouts and concrete cows…

In the process of racking up a large hump of air-miles I have flown on 11 different airlines and I can say without a doubt that Alaska Airlines has been the carrier that has provided the fasted check-in, slickest and most useful App, and all my flights were somewhat on-time. The Alaska App was the clincher. I checked in on the way to the airport, chose my seat, fast-tracked through security, and the QR bar code on my iPhone was scanned at the gate for my boarding pass. From Taxi to assigned seat in the aircraft it took me a total of 23 minutes! Really, I timed it. Now, I still had to remove my shoes (fvck you very much asshat shoe-bombing terrorists!!) and take my laptop out of my bag, but that is just par for the course. If every flight check-in and trip to the gate was this great, then I wouldn’t complain at all about air travel.

Drinking the black stuff in Ireland

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

I resolved not to travel as much in 2012 as I did in 2011 (over 150K air miles), but I am not off to an auspicious start: by January 17th, I already had just over 9,000 miles and I am booked for another British/European tour in March,  but I can say for a fact that 2012 has started off with much sweeter miles,  My J-O-B sent me to England and Ireland for 8 days and my sweet little wife, Stamps-With-Foot, got to tag along for the first time in years.  I can’t tell you how great it was to have her the with me!  I slept great, I didn’t miss her when I saw some new or interesting site since she was right there.  I had a dinner date every night and it was guaranteed that would be invited back to her place…

We had a day off in London and a night out in Dublin and we made the most of our time seeing old friends, visiting the V&A, taking the Globe Theatre tour, wandering through the Sherlock Homes “Museum”, visiting favorite shops, drinking Guinness, ogling the floor at Christchurch, more Guinness, and listening to Irish trad music on the top floor of Gogarty’s in Temple Bar.  It was a really nice mid-winter diversion for us, though there were some tears shed over Brodie, my wife’s puppy/fur-baby, not being there to snuggle her to sleep…

German Christmas Markets and My Ornament Fetish

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I had to take a quick trip back to Hamburg, Germany for work just before Christmas this year.  Aside from all our close friends there, the thing that Stamps-With-Foot and I miss most about Germany are the Christmas markets.  This is how Christmas should be done everywhere: booths selling hand-made small gifts, warm candied peanuts, hand-blown glass ornaments, hot mulled wine for sale on every corner, hand-painted pewter ornaments, Christmas music, grilled sausage, happy people holding hands, groups caroling, smiling kids, young lovers sneaking a kiss behind the huts…

I had about 3 hours between getting off work and having to drive to the airport, so I walked through the ice and snow to a couple of the larger markets, bought ~$400 in ornaments (we/I have a Christmas tree decorating fetish…) and small gifts for my lovely wife and the kids., then I took some pictures of all the wreathed ambiance.