Today We Escape 

Frankfurt Airport around 6:00 AM local time.

I had been in India less than 5 hours when I vomited. I hadn’t even eaten anything which was probably the problem. You see I left my house in Toronto around 2:30 PM Saturday. By 6:00 AM Sunday the next day I was in the Frankfurt airport. Six hours later I was on a flight to Bangalore and by 6:00 AM Monday morning I had gone through customs, currency exchange and an hour long cab ride to finally be able to lower my head on a pillow for the first time in about 35 hours. That’s when I started to shiver and things began to spin. Fortunately, I think that was the briefest affects of having taken an anti-malaria pill on an empty stomach and it quickly subsided. I awoke about 9 hours later.

In the last 90 days of 2016 I spent 32 nights in a different bed. That’s over 1/3 of that time or 1 day out of 2.85 days were spent away from home. While it was mostly on someone else’s dime, it was also someone else’s time. It’s strange to have it seem a burden to go from New York to Paris, but it was. The trick with business travel is to figure out a way to use it in your favour which is what I’m trying to do on this trip to India.

Last Autumn’s Total Travel Numbers = 48,429 Km
33 days
4 Countries
7 Cities
61 hrs of flight time
25 hrs of movies and TV
10 lbs of extra weight

Now on to India you can add another 26,000 Km, 48 hours of travel time, and 9 more nights in another bed to the tally. I’m here for work. Exactly about 16 hours of meetings. So yes, it took me longer to get here than I have to be here. But I’m going to take the second half of the week and take in the beach and the heat and some swimming and some beach (did I say beach?) and some of the culture of Goa which is about an hour’s flight west of Bangalore. My first impressions of Bangalore? Well, it seems like a place where the 17th century rubs up against the 22nd Century with a lot of friction in between. In front of gleaming towers, is a woman over an open fire, no stove, just a fire, cooking something? The highway occasionally became a dirt road or at least the lane that a bus decided was a lane was just dirt. And here I am, in a very Western style hotel with all the amenities, which is situated in a business park of low rise modern buildings but looking out my window I can see several rising plumes of smoke, a ramshackle building where sarong-wearing young men come and go for unknown purpose and oddly an employee of the hotel seemed to be carrying some kind of smoking canister, apparently dusting the bushes surrounding the building. As I write this I can hear a group of dogs barking themselves hoarse.

It’s already been an adventure, but there’s work to be done before lying in the sun and days before I’m spending a night in my own bed.

Peter-odometer
Toronto to Oslo: 5932 x 2 = 11864 Km
Toronto to Canmore: 3530 x 2 = 7060 Km
Toronto to Winchester, UK = 5655 Km
Winchester, UK, to Paris, France = 550 Km
Paris, France to Toronto = 6000 Km
Toronto to NYC 555 x 2 = 1110
Toronto to Paris, France = 6000 Km x 2 = 12000 Km
Toronto to St. John’s and back = 4200 Km