Don’t know about you, but I’m glad it’s the weekend.
It’s been a good week, but I’m really looking forward to next week and our annual family vacation. We’ll be hanging out, crabbing and generally enjoy late summertime on the South Carolina coast. This is a special vacation for us because our only granddaughter is starting school this year.
And starting school means family hangout time suddenly gets more scarce. School and all its related activities precludes a lot of the spontaneous getting-together we’ve enjoyed.
Another reason I’m looking forward to next week, is that I’m (finally) beginning to tire of business travel. For more than 40 years, I’ve averaged more than one hundred nights per year away from home. The average is likely closer to 125 nights, but you get the picture.
Loving what you do - including the travel that goes along with it- makes your job a delight, but it also means a lot of time away from home.
Going to preview new products means you go hands-on with new gear well in advance of its being announced. That means you are prepared with information beyond the press releases when it’s announced. It also means you’ve previewed with experts at hand to answer questions. Both those things enable us to do a better job for you. And getting you the information is what this job’s all about.
This week, I was fortunate enough to attend another Crimson Trace test event at Kentucky’s Rockcastle Shooting Center. It’s jokingly called the “cave crawl” because to get to the test site, you literally crawl down into a claustrophobia-inducing slit in the earth to get to what is, essentially, a meandering hole in the ground.
There's a geological reason it’s a "hole". But it's not the same reason your throat gets dry and your breath gets short as you begin the climb down that ladder. Jim Shepherd/OWDN photo.
After a couple of trips, like flying, trips into “the hole” become “no big deal”.
That’s an awkward segue to the fact that like many other “seasoned” travelers, I take climbing on a plane for granted. Most of my friends and colleagues, in fact, flew to the “cave crawl” -including Crimson Trace’s Mike Faw.
Unlike the rest of us, however, Mike’s trip took an unexpected turn as he was returning home to Oregon Wednesday.
I’d been home for hours when I got a text message from Mike that got my undivided attention: “Well plane I am on hit another. Grounded in Chicago. Damaged wings.”
For one of our "cave crawlers" the trip home took an unexpected detour when his United flight clipped the wing of another plane. Mike Faw photo.
His was a pretty nonchalant description of an event that made headlines on the 24 hour news channels- despite the fact no one was injured.
Seems Faw and the other passengers on both planes exited their aircraft out the rear emergency stairs to the discomforting aroma of aviation fuel.
I’ve flown a ridiculous amount of miles on a variety of airplanes that ranged from state-of-the-art to what-was-I-thinking, but I’ve never had to exit down an emergency stair.
That puts what many of us consider just another part of our job - travel- in perspective. It also makes me appreciate the layers of safety procedures I seldom even pay attention to in the safety briefings before takeoff. The next time I fly, I’ll know where the emergency exits are.
The initial concern made Mike’s final late-night message all the funnier: “Made it to Portland. Alive. LOL.”
The old traveler’s saying is “any landing you walk away from is a good one.”
But the old saying pilots use is far more accurate: “Any landing where you can reuse the plane is a really good one.”
After a “minor collision” before takeoff, de-planing in Portland had to qualify as a “very good one.”
It helped put something we often forget into perspective: nothing is assured when we routinely leave our families to go do our jobs.
That’s just another reason I’m looking forward to the weekend- and time with my family next week.
Hope you take advantage of the time you have with your families as well-and you don’t take it for granted.
We’ll keep you posted.
—Jim Shepherd
