Author: James David (Page 3 of 25)

On Thursday, I ventured west on what turned into a five and a half hour drive to Bryson City, a little mountain town abreast the Nantahala River and up against Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The drive was longer than I’d hoped (and the drive back on Sunday was mostly spent in the rain of a tropical remnant), but the trip accomplished most of what I wanted.

I did not time the foliage well as I was at least a week early to see the peak fall colors, but this was the time I had available and there is always some variability in those forecasts. My parents joined from Thursday to Saturday, which meant a more leisurely Friday than might have otherwise been the case. I worked in the morning before an afternoon walk to see the three waterfalls that are readily accessible from the Deep Creek entrance to the national park. Then I made a regrettable dinner choice of a place that put way too much cheese on their pizzas and we called it an early night so they would be rested for their drive back.

The main purpose of the trip for me was the two half day hikes that I took on Saturday. Both were similar in that they went straight up ridges to high vantage points, with lots of elevation gain and dirt and gravel underfoot. I wanted the hikes to be hard as a reminder to myself. And I like to hear the sound of crunching under my boots. I was actually breaking in new boots on this trip as my old reliable footwear finally succumbed to time while I was in the Faroe Islands. The view was better and more unobstructed at the top of the first hike, a shorter one up to a fire tower in the national forest south of the national park, than at the top of my longer afternoon hike in the national park. The net effect of the hikes was that, for a few hours anyway, I was able to turn off my phone and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. My mind never emptied, but it was as close to a Zen experience as I’ve had in a while.

I opted to stay at a bed and breakfast out of town and close to the park entrance. I wanted both to save a little by getting breakfast included and be away from any late night noise. It was certainly quiet, and the breakfasts were all good as the operator used to be a professional chef. The best two meals of the short trip, though, were at permanent food trucks, one a plate of Korean-style sweet short ribs with rice and vegetables and the other a pastrami and corned beef sandwich on rye. I put yellow mustard on mine and nothing else, which tends to lead to slightly befuddled looks. Not that that has ever stopped me. I don’t expect I’ll be going back to that particular little town again soon as there are closer options, but it was refreshing to breathe some mountain air and to wake up nestled against a different part of the same mountain range that was an ever present during my childhood.

I kicked off my version of the Broadway season last night. No, I didn’t make a quick trip back to New York. Instead, I drove downtown to see The Sound of Music at DPAC, a theater that is really much nicer than should be in a city this size. I’ve probably written that before, but I’m reminded of that fact every time I go.

I ate dinner beforehand at a restaurant that tries to transport you to the French Quarter in New Orleans. While it doesn’t quite achieve that set in a renovated tobacco warehouse as it is, the gumbo is good. The hostess seemed surprised when I asked to sit at a table instead of at the bar. And I get it, as a table for one means an empty seat. But I was also eating early and there were open tables the entire time I was there. I’ve long since gotten over any anxiety about eating alone if that’s the concern. Then I took a short, leisurely stroll over to the theater.

This year, I decided to upgrade my seating. Previously, I’ve always been in the upper deck, often towards a back corner. Last night, I was in the second row of the middle deck. It was a worthwhile upgrade. Not only was I closer to the stage and so could see more of the actors’ expressions, but I also didn’t have as many people in front of me fidgeting around and so had a clearer view of the stage. I did have a few children behind me last night, but their sound effects added to the show instead of detracting from it. I’ve purchased a ticket for three shows thus far and may add a fourth once the tickets for Hamilton go on sale. If nothing else, it gives me something different to do on a few Tuesday evenings.

The show itself was the longest I’ve seen in some time. There was even an intermission. The child actors were poised and composed and the lead actress is a star in the making. Having seen the movie more than once before, there weren’t any surprises, though at least they stuck to what worked and didn’t attempt a contemporary political browbeating and that was refreshing. It ranks in the top 5 for me, and I’ve seen enough shows for that to have some meaning.

Three trips to New York City in a year are at least two too many. I especially feel that way when all three were for work. This one was the hardest of the three, not least because I slept the worst this time. The buildings seemed to press down on me even more too. I also don’t really have the disposition to be successful over long stretches of a conference with lots of ambient noise and background conversations. It isn’t playing to my strengths. Even though I push through when called upon for conferences like this, it is draining to do so. This conference was at least more like two meeting sprints each day rather than two marathons. We almost never attend content sessions at conferences; that’s not the reason we’re here. Conferences like this one are all about 1:1 (or 1:2 as the case may be) meetings making and deepening connections with potential clients and partners. And we won’t really know if it was a success for at least a few months.

I tried to keep things positive. I continued my practice of exploring the New York food scene on this visit. We had two dinners, so I chose one exotic place and one more traditional. Last night’s Bolognese was very good at the Midtown Italian restaurant that was our more traditional NYC dinner. It was also a shorter walk from our hotel, but I preferred the Cambodian restaurant on the Upper East Side where we had dinner on Monday as it offered something I cannot quite get at home. While it was a far cry from sitting on a brightly colored little plastic stool on the street eating frog legs in Siem Reap, not least because it was air conditioned, the food was all very good. We had beef skewers with a peanut sauce for an appetizer and I ordered duck breast in a tamarind sauce, a tangy sauce that paired well with the duck fat and didn’t overpower the rice. The Angkor artwork adorning the walls was also a nice touch. Then I had passionfruit gelato on the walk back to add some Latin sour into the culinary mix for the evening.

Now that I live in South Durham, I’m roughly equidistant between downtown Durham and downtown Chapel Hill. That means I get to explore the Chapel Hill food scene in the same way that I did Durham’s over the past two years. That exploration started when my family was here in August, but that kicked up a bit this weekend. On Friday for dinner and Saturday for lunch, I went to Chapel Hill restaurants that had been recommended by members of my church small group.

Friday night, I ate at a fancy-ish French brasserie. White-tiled floor; airy space; open kitchen; staff in black. I opted for an early dinner so the place wasn’t loud yet when I arrived and really didn’t get loud even as more guests filed in. I wouldn’t repeat my appetizer choice, but the scallops and cauliflower accompaniment were very good and the brown butter almond cake with strawberries I had for dessert had a nice balance to it. I also had a crisp, dry French cider that was much better than the American offerings that are often far too sweet. There were several items on the menu that I searched for with my phone. Through the power of the internet and enhanced search, I was shown recipes in French. Those weren’t helpful, but my follow-on prompts to translate these into English gave me summaries of the dishes and not just translations of the recipes. That was an algorithm actually producing what I wanted.

Saturday I had lunch at a hamburger joint, the opposite end of the fanciness scale but every bit as good. I went off-menu and ordered my version of a breakfast burger (bacon, egg, and mustard) which led to a mix up with the cashier. Even though I told her no cheese and she confirmed that, they still put cheese on the burger so I had them remake it. This restaurant started as a student hangout, though I went to a different location with more parking. The burger was thick and juicy, not like the smashburgers that so many places serve. The egg was cooked over medium, which is what I like to see as it doesn’t get too messy. And the bacon was good, but that is perhaps the most difficult part to screw up. I went with tater tots for my side, which were unspectacular and which I’ve since been told were a big mistake by someone who loves their French fries. Alas. I also drank a root beer with lunch because I rarely do anything half-heartedly, even nostalgia. Not that the nostalgia lasted that long, though, as I went home and put in a few hours at my computer working that afternoon.

Saturday afternoon marked a small milestone. I finished assembling a small table for my entryway and placed the container for my keys, wallet, and headphones atop it. This was the final piece of furniture for my new residence, finally in its place, some six weeks after taking possession and after a few rounds of ordering additional items. I’ve also put all of my pictures up and they’ve stayed up, so things should now be in their places for the duration of my stay here. Yes, I had some issues with command strips that forced a rethink but everything has been okay for at least a few days now. And since I’m renting, some of the projects I envision for the place simply won’t happen. I’ve not had any more visitors since my family came in mid-August, but at least now I feel ready to host people here. That is also a pleasant change.

Yesterday, I took both a morning and evening walk. I took different paths for each for some variety as there are several paved trails that wind through the neighborhood, some alongside the roads and others tucked between houses. I don’t get the crunch of gravel underfoot that kept the rhythm of my walks at my prior residence, but there are many more options here and I’m able to choose a route that better suits the amount of time I have available.

This is also a time when a lot of my scheduled activities are returning so my calendar will have more consistency also. I’m looking forward to that, though there are a few more conferences coming up too, both repeat trips to places I’ve already visited this for conferences. There will definitely be fewer work trips in 2026. We’ve been conducting an assessment of work trips in 2025 this week and it has not made for pleasant reading.

We made a commitment this year to go all-in on conferences. It was a worthwhile bet but not one that we’ll repeat moving forward. There are still a couple more this year, too, but next year we’re going to double down on the few that worked and skip the rest. This week, we went to SEETA, one of the conferences that worked best for us in 2024. It helps that it is co-hosted by schools that mean we can drive instead of fly and that we can put on smaller events for during the rest of the year. We generally wait until spring to host events on campus, but we probably will again this school year at at least one of the four participating universities.

I am an introvert who tends to shut down in the face of sensory overload, especially auditory overload. I’m not a big concert person for this reason. Being at a conference, though, requires me to be “on” for hours upon hours and to be talking to people most of that time. Sure I’m able to steal a few minutes here and there in order to find some quiet and recharge, but it’s like your phone being on 5% charge and you only have enough time to plug it in to get up to 10%. Big receptions with lots of people and a wall of sound make this even harder, but I can white knuckle it for a while. And don’t even get me started on the insanity of pumping music into a conference event space.

I’m also still not used to the way people at ETA conferences will walk up to me and start a conversation as if I know them since they’ve watched some of our webinars. It is something of a de facto business development filter for this reason. The best side effect of this parasocial dynamic, though, is that people will self-select and approach me at these events so that I don’t have to guess who I should try to speak with in a crowded reception hall.

Charlottesville was lovely and I wish I had an extra day to explore it more. It was very warm on Friday but we were inside and then the weather was nice by the time the event ended late Saturday afternoon and we joined one of our classmates and his family for pizza. I also walked on UVA’s campus on Sunday morning before driving back. It has more historical buildings than most college campuses, though there was ample construction taking place too, and there were very few people milling about given when I was there. Dinner on both Friday and Saturday were good. Friday, we ate late at a comfort food Southern type of place amongst a cluster of restaurants in an otherwise residential area and Saturday was pizza. I also walked through the downtown area Saturday night. It is definitely a college town, for better and worse.

After yesterday and looking at today’s agenda, I can well and truly say that vacation is over. We are in the midst of a very busy time. I was swamped with work while Bill was away, then the reverse. Now we’ll both be very busy for a time. This is a very different situation to what we faced during parts of last year. A better one. My sleep schedule is more or less back to normal. That took two nights longer than I’d hoped it would take as it is normally much easier to come back from Europe than to go to Europe in that regard. Overall, coming back has been more jarring than I wanted it to be. I was forced into a slower rhythm and appreciated it, but now that is over.

As I predicted in last week’s newsletter, seeing the puffins was the highlight of my trip. I spoke with several other tourists during my stay who were unable to go to Mykines to see the puffins due to choppy seas cancelling the ferry. That means I had a stroke of travel luck on this trip. And there was another when my flight back to Iceland actually took off as that flight was cancelled each of the previous few days before my scheduled departure. I made my tight connection without difficulty even if I was unable to get anything to eat in the airport and had to wait for what became a very late dinner on my body clock when I got home.

The other highlight was an 11 course tasting menu at a seafood restaurant (though the final two courses were chocolate desserts and so wasted on me). It was very expensive though not much more expensive than meals that were not nearly as good. I did not eat at the cousin restaurant that just received two Michelin stars as that would have involved an even greater expenditure. The breakfast at my hotel was also very nice each morning as I loaded up on salmon and rhubarb juice. This was a critical benefit given how limited lunch was on several days on the various tours driving to different parts of the archipelago.

And I cannot conclude writing about the Faroe Islands without mentioning their undersea tunnels. They’ve built several tunnels that go underwater between the more populated islands. They even have an underwater roundabout in one of them, to my knowledge the only such roundabout in the world. You can look up more about that on YouTube if you want. It’s also a pretty wild image on digital maps if you’re into that sort of thing.

I am writing this from a hotel perched above Torshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. In almost any other place, it would be just a fishing village. Here, it holds just under half of the population. The Faroes are part of Denmark but are more-or-less autonomous. If you’re wondering where and what they are, the Faroe Islands are a striated archipelago of volcanic rock in the North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland. The economy is built on salmon farming with some wool production and a budding tourism industry thrown in. It never gets hot here, which is a big part of why I came, and the weather’s defining feature is the wind. Most people risk sunburn on their summer vacations; I’ve been windburned on mine.

Why would I come to a place like this? Several people have asked, so these were the and somewhere I hadn’t been before. There are other places that meet those criteria, but this is the place I chose for this summer. There was also a draw for me in the desolate, wind-swept landscapes that mark this place.

There are almost no trees here. There are also sheep that eat any little seedling they can reach, so it’s not easy to tell if that is entirely the result of weather and wind. There are no land predators on the islands as all mammals were introduced. Naturally, these islands are sanctuaries for seabirds. That is actually one of their main attractions in summer. On Saturday, I took a ferry out to the westernmost island in the archipelago specifically to see the puffins that nest there in a huge colony. The little birds look similar to penguins but can fly, fast if not exactly gracefully, and spend their days this time of year catching fish out at sea and bringing them back to feed their chicks. Watching them might end up being the highlight of the entire trip for me. It was on the way back from Mykines that I got windburned when I calculated that a little sting on my face later would be much preferable to throwing up now on the boat. Later today, I’ll be back on a boat taking in views of sea cliffs on another island. The weather looks calm this morning, so I hope that the seas will be smooth and that I will enjoy it as much as I have most of the other places I’ve seen.

Despite its size, Torshavn packs a culinary punch. I suppose that is to be expected as it is ultimately governed from Copenhagen. All of the restaurants definitely have Copenhagen prices. I’ve had really good food at a few places; I’ve also had to eat two dinners, but I’ll reflect on the food more once the trip is finished. Culturally, the place is more like Iceland than Denmark (I haven’t been to Norway to make that comparison) and the language isn’t Danish at all. According to what one of the guides said, the islands were given to Denmark by the king of Norway a few hundred years ago as a dowry for his daughter. That historical quirk explains those differences so I have little reason not to believe him.

Last weekend, we took advantage of one of the newer airlines offering underserved route pairs to have my brother and sister-in-law fly nonstop to come stay with me. My parents also had already planned to be in North Carolina around the same time, so they extended their stay and drove farther east to join us. I expect that there was some advance coordination, but those logistics did mean both that everyone would be together for a few days and that I’d be saved a trip to the airport on Thursday afternoon.

Since it was my brother and sister-in-law’s first visit to the Triangle, we crammed in a lot of local restaurants: Dim sum; Peruvian chicken; local smashburgers; Persian ice cream; and a fancy new American place that I hadn’t had a reason to visit previously. We visited the farmer’s market on Saturday morning for breakfast pastries and I scrambled to find a coffee shop where Dad could get another cup. As I don’t drink coffee, that was harder than planning all of the various restaurants. It was definitely more driving than I usually do in the course of a weekend and that may have led to a warped perspective and/or disorientation as to where different places are relative to each other in the Triangle, but such costs must be paid sometimes for culinary exploration.

I worked more than I’d hoped on Friday (there was a closing after all and Bill didn’t return until Monday), so they went off and explored some on their own since they had another vehicle. This followed them joining me for an early lunch after they had spent the morning walking along the forested paths through the neighborhood. No one complained to me about the trip, so I’ll take that as a positive.

This week also marked the official closing of a chapter as I handed in my apartment key fob and garage access card at the conclusion of my lease. I’ve now fully moved into my new accommodation and have survived having five people here for ~72 hours. I don’t expect to have any more visitors for a little while, though I do hope to have more on average here than I did while I lived downtown. One of the big differences is that now I have a guest bedroom that doesn’t also double as my office.

Last week I described the goal as minimum viability for my new living quarters. I’d transported some stuff over the weekend but the big moving day was Monday. That I’m covering for both of us with client work meant there wasn’t much time or energy left for unpacking and arranging things. I still worked to make slow, consistent progress, though, and made a bigger push on Saturday.

Now I’ve achieved closer to a normalized baseline. Of course as I sit in my recliner typing this I’m looking at two boxes of decorations that I’ve not yet placed on the shelves they will adorn nor have I put anything up on the walls and so pictures are spread across the dining room table, so the process isn’t exactly complete. There are a few things I still need to purchase to make the space work for me, but I should have those in place within another week or so. Then I should feel the space to be mine. I talked to someone this week about how that part—decorating and settling in—was his favorite part of the whole moving process. While it is certainly better than twisting screws and carrying furniture, I still don’t think I can say I enjoy it. At this point, I just want it to be finished. But maybe that’s just a lesser part of me talking.

All of this is going to be tested in the coming days. I’ll have several guests staying with me so if something isn’t in order they’ll surely point it out and hopefully fix it. I’m not as excited as I’d like to be about family coming here. I’ll mark that down to the volume of work right now. As I described it to a few people, work right now feels like a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie to eat. I know it’s just for a season and I’ll white knuckle my way through it. It’s certainly a better problem to have than the inverse problem of no work that we experienced at the start of last year.