At the behest of my 94 year old Grandma Elsie, I have decided to start journaling a bit about my travels. She thinks I'll forget someday, but what does she know - she's only 94 :)
A small town boy, I took my first flight in the summer after my second year of graduate school, which was at the end of my first year at University of Michigan. I flew with my colleague and mentor, Dr. Jun-Sik Kim who was a postdoc at the time, and has since moved back to his home country of South Korea to serve as a faculty. We were to present the game plan for our structural health monitoring technique at the kickoff meeting for a newly started project. We flew to Huntsville, AL - a small city with a huge presence of military and government contractors and home to Redstone Arsenal.
On the day of travel, we arrived at the Detroit Metro Airport with time to spare, so we relaxed and had a bite to eat after getting through security. All of a sudden, Jun-Sik sprang to his feet and said "We gotta go!" Our flight was to leave the gate within minutes. We ran past terminals, through the rainbow tunnel, past more terminals, and soon found out the doors to the flight were shut and we had missed it. I missed my first flight! We were able to catch the next one, but Jun-Sik's luggage didn't make it to our final destination of Huntsville, AL. He had to give his talk to the room full of well dressed engineers and government officials in a t-shirt and jeans! Luckily, this turned out to be one of the most easy-going audiences, so everything went smoothly and was well received. The next day, he did recover his luggage and On the return flight to Detroit, we were at the terminal itself with time to spare!
I've been back to Huntsville a number of time to give my own talks on the project. I always stayed at the Holiday Inn near the mall, and they started giving me a room on the top floor, which was key access only and had free breakfast in the morning and drinks in the evening. Don't tell them I'm only a grad student.
Through my studies, I've traveled lots of other places, including Vergennes, VT; San Diego and Los Angeles, CA; Washington, DC; and Scottsdale, AZ. As a graduate student, I have the privilege of traveling fairly frequently on the tab of my research sponsor. Extracurricularly, I've been to Denver, CO; Lynchburg, VA; St. Ingace, MI; and Tampa and Orlando, FL to visit friends and see the sights. Maybe I'll write some memories from these as I have time.
Amanda H. gave me the name for this blog. She always liked to ask me, "are you jet setting again this weekend, Dave?" The answer is often yes!
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