The Un-Travel Business Traveler

It’s 8:54pm here in Houston, TX and tomorrow is my last day of class. It’s been a decent week but the weather has been more than 30 degrees every day so I’ve stayed inside as much as I can and have avoided doing much site seeing. Truth be told, this is more common than you might think.

I’ve been a business traveler now for more than 12 years. In the course of my work excursions, I’ve logged 650,000+ kilometers around the globe and back. But since those early days, my travel habits for work trips have changed drastically.

In the early days, the first thing I used to do when booking a work trip was to check out what there was to do and see in the area. Throw in a quick check for geocaches in the area and I was all set to go. I’d get off the plane, get to my hotel, drop my stuff, and go explore. Every day once my classes were finished I’d head back to my room, change my clothes, and go exploring again. This was a daily routine for pretty much every trip I was taking.

Fast forward 12 years and here I am in my hotel room, finishing season 3 of what must be my third or forth time binge watching Warehouse 13. Since getting to Houston, I have not left this room save for going to class in the morning.

On a completely unrelated note, I finally got a chance to use the Flirc I bought with Kodi and a universal remote. Sure makes watching my personal media from my laptop on a TV a whole lot nicer when you can use a remote control.

Are there things I could be doing in Houston in the evenings? I’m sure there are. I could easily Google things to do and go explore, but I find myself less and less inclined to go outside. In fact, sitting in my room watching TV, or even doing extra work has become the norm for me when it comes to my business trips these days.

Occasionally I end up somewhere interesting and I do explore, but more often than not I’m feeling more and more disinterested in seeing what is around me than just vegging in my hotel room. How many tall buildings can you really look at, or how many parks can you really wander through? Even geocaching now has become less of an interest while on the road since snagging all of those states in my big trip last year. I used to go caching to see things in the city that you normally wouldn’t catch, but now I just shrug at the idea of even bothering.

It feels more and more like my travel interests are shifting towards the trips where I’m either with my friends and family, or going someplace truly exotic. After awhile, every major city starts to look the same and really doesn’t feel any different. I was in Cincinnati last weekend with a friend of mine and if I hadn’t known that was the city I was in, there’s nothing that would have made it stand out for me. It sort of just blends in with countless other cities I have seen in many other places.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that for us business travelers, despite being given the opportunity to travel to many destinations, it’s really not all that interesting after you’ve done the same thing again and again a hundred times. It truly makes you appreciate the special trips even more.