Friday Five

The Excuse

I usually peck this thing out on Friday while sitting in the airport awaiting my flight out of whatever town I’ve found myself in that particular week. The particular client I was working for this week prefers their trainers fly home on Saturday. So I sit on flight 1669 out of Houston for San Diego.

The Week

I was in Tampa, FL this week. Or Clearwater to be more specific. It was my second time in Tampa, and it worked out better this time than last as I was able to see friends this trip. The first few days were all work, but Thursday and Friday included some time for play. Thursday was dinner with Joe-Bob and Friday was dinner with Amy & Bill, all of whom have commented here before and are great friends of mine (and fantastic people to boot). It’s always nice to get a little pleasure out of a business trip.

And on a little personal note, it was also wonderful to have Dunkin Donuts again. It’s amazing how one misses the regional things that others take for granted.

The Restaurant

Joe and I did dinner over on the west side of Clearwater at a place called Frenchy’s Cafe. It’s a shack-style seafood joint, which seems pretty popular in Tampa (or at least I’ve noticed a handful of them).

We wound up being seated by whom I’m pretty sure was the GM of the place.

Joe insisted I try stone crab, which I’d never had before. I found out that the way they harvest stone crab is they pull the crab out of the water and pull off one side of its legs and throw it back in. They pull off the other side the next year. This led to the following exchange:

Me: That’s a tough existence.

Joe: A delicious existence.

I can’t argue, as the crab was fantastic. And I can assure you that based on their shells stone crabs aren’t called stone crabs for nothing.

Dinner was a Cajun style grouper sandwich for me and a buffalo grouper sandwich for him. All very tasty.

If you find yourself in Clearwater, you should certainly stop by.

The Exercise

Hey look – I still have this section on the blog!

The Travel Note

There are many things that need to change at the San Diego Airport. Terminal One has one bad restaurant on the other side of security. There’s only one runway. And its location makes things a tad interesting for planes landing. But what I do love is the fact that the taxi time from the runway to the gate is near nothing. That and the location next to the harbor is just gorgeous.

The Five

Let’s see if I can’t peck out five things.

1. I often wonder if we have too many “social networking” applications. Between Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, … I feel like about the only person who it’s difficult to talk to is the person in front of me.
2. Normally it’s near impossible for me to get out of bed. But every now and then something happens and I just start magically waking up right before my alarm goes off. This was one of those weeks.
3. One of my favorite things is feeling the plane make its decent into San Diego knowing I’m just about home.
4. If travel has taught me one thing this winter is that I hate cold weather. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
5. When I was about to start going to school I came *this* close to going to flight school instead of going to school for computers. I made the right decision.