Six days delay in Minneapolis

CasperBlog, Explore, Featured, Work

Several weeks ago, I was invited to visit a two day customer meeting at HP in Boise, Idaho. We were a group of 10 people from The Netherlands, we left on Sunday and were to return on Thursday. None of us expected to return almost a week later. None us would have taken you seriously if you had told us that we would get stuck in Minneapolis because a volcano in Iceland erupted and rendered the entire European airspace impermeable for a week. And so it happened: as we were flying home from Boise, the volcano started and we did get stuck in Minneapolis. Initially I managed to get a flight for two days later, but that was cancelled as well and the next available seat was another week (!) later.
So what did we do? How did we manage? Here are the snippets of activities we undertook to kill time and have fun doing it.
First of all: work from the hotel every morning. With 7 hours time difference you only have a few hours to talk to people in NL on the phone and afterwards you have plenty of time to do work on your laptop as you would normally do. I have taken “het nieuwe werken” to a whole new level.
But while you’re in the US, you might as well do some fun stuff as well. We went to the first night game of the Minnesota Twins in their brand new outdoor Target Field, we went to see Chick Corea in the Dakota Jazz Club, we rented two massive V8 Escalades, we did extensive shopping at the Mall of America, I bought an iPad, more shopping at the mall, went to a 3D movie, took a ride in the roller-coaster at the mall, had lunch with an old friend who happened to live very near Minneapolis, went to see one of the 10000 lakes, tried to get more iPads for friends back home (they were out of stock), call the airlines every hour, watched twitter, facebook and the web for all new developments, tried many different restaurants and basically have as much fun as possible. And we succeeded beautifully, I think.
Nonetheless, I would have much rather gone home. I was missing out on a lot of important stuff at home. I missed my wife and kids.
So now I am sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to depart, writing a blog post on my new iPad. I think this time I am really flying home, I hope…