Cincinnati doesn’t appear to be truck friendly… I had to go to down town Cincinnati for a week of meetings with a customer and some other folks I work with during my “day job” and since it is only a 4-5 hour I decided to drive instead of spending the time in the airport.
The nice thing about driving (besides all the obvious stuff I mentioned in a previous post that I dislike about flying) is that it allowed me to bring two laptops: my corporate laptop for work and my dev laptop that I write joeware on. This lets me work on finishing up AdMod, etc at night when sitting around in the hotel like I am now. When I fly, it isn’t feasible to carry two laptops so I end up not getting to do regular life stuff when traveling for work[1] because I must bring my corporate laptop and I do not mix work stuff and the joeware stuff at all. Of course this wouldn’t be an issue going to say London or Greece or Canberra or Italy or places like that where sitting in the room working on the computer would be the last thing in my mind.
So the idea was drive down in the truck (Dodge Ram 2500 Extended Cab Power Wagon aka 3/4 ton truck with offroad package and 33″ tires so larger rather than smaller – while I couldn’t live in it I have slept rather comfortable in it) and park at the Westin’s parking lot and wander off to the office and then come back and check in this evening after work. Well I get to the Westin which was complicated enough (downtown Cinci is interesting to drive a large vehicle in to say the least…) but when I get there the porters are like… uh yeah, we don’t have any place to park that… They had a parking garage that didn’t look to be high enough to take on a Chevy S-10 lowrider mini pickup truck let alone a real truck. So I ended up having to go several blocks away to park the truck in an open air parking lot. Quite annoying, then I had to go back and check in because I’ll be darned if I will leave my Dev laptop with all of the joeware sourcecode sitting in the truck in a parking lot in the middle of the city.
As I was walking around town I looked at the parking available and unless it is on the street or an open lot, you aren’t parking a big truck/SUV in their parking garages here. Even a small SUV will give you issues… So if you need to go to Cinci and you have a larger vehicle… take a cab. 🙂
On the plus side, the city itself seems nice as do the people. We did the obligatory go to the bar and drink and chat and bond with the customer thing and the guy we are dealing with is from Kentucky and quite an interesting guy; found out his wife works for our company and he went to school for CIS and actually used to work on compilers… You have to love knowledgeable customers like that… At least I do, I am not aiming to confuse or bedazzle anyone, I give them the straight scoop and let them figure out which of the ways I suggest that they want me to get done to fix their stuff… Anyway, beautiful state Kentucky, I could see myself living there. I didn’t really realize how close it is to Michigan. Five hours isn’t bad at all. Couple that with the 4 hours to get up to the part of Michigan where most of my family is though and that gets annoying. But still… Anyway, the bar was nice, very old fashioned feel, very nice, very pregnant waitress. She took a decent sized drink order completely out of order (i.e. not left to right or anything nice) and didn’t miss a beat. It was great when one of the guys (Dave) asked for a Ginger Ale (how odd to hear someone ask for a ginger ale instead of for a Vernor’s, is that a Michigan thing to say you want a Vernor’s when asking for a ginger ale?) and the waitress was like, you really don’t want that, we have Fago ginger ale and it is too sweet… Everyone at the table was like Fago? Well except me, Fago is huge in Michigan as well. I was like, you drink Fago for the Red pop or Rock and Rye, not ginger ale… So Dave got the IBC root beer. Good job Cincinnati waitress. 🙂
I was told by a couple of folks before coming here that there are some seriously bad parts of Cinci, once I got here I was told there are but in general most of the folks felt safer here than say in NYC. It definitely smells better here. 🙂 They said I can walk in any direction I want, if it starts looking run down, turn around. LOL.
So that is about it… Too bad they don’t like trucks.
joe
[1] Which makes you think you should put down on the time sheet for every minute you aren’t able to do what you would want to be doing yourself and would be doing if you weren’t traveling for work.
