The Routine

The Last Resort - 0 stars
Hartford airport (BDL)

Waffle House - 2 stars
All over the South

Panera - 1 star
Your friendly local strip mall

Musashi - 0 stars
Detroit airport (DTW)

One week the JW Marriott in Copacabana, the next week (after a short break) ... the Comfort Inn in Birmingham, Alabama, after eating a disgusting piece of pizza (barely any tomato sauce, slightly sour-tasting cheese that had none of the properties of mozzarella) in the Hartford airport for dinner.

This blog is mainly about travel, and business travel in particular. In airports, you see happy couples, tired families with too much equipment, lost-looking kids on their first trips alone ... and then you see neatly dressed, single people with computer bags and expensive-looking carry-on suitcases, walking directly to wherever they are going, usually checking their Blackberries or looking for power outlets - that's us (or "that's we," which I believe is actually correct).

And the typical business trip is not to Rio, or Paris, or any of those fun places - it's to Birmingham, Alabama, and it goes something like this:

• 5 pm (Eastern): Arrive at airport. Go up and down escalator with 1-year-old daughter who just came home on a flight from visiting her cousins for a week. (OK, that's not typical.)
• 6.30: Aforementioned disgusting piece of pizza.
• 11 pm (Central): Arrive at Birmingham, by way of Charlotte. Take bus to rental car, which turns out to be a hulking Jeep Patriot. Drive 3 miles to Comfort Inn, where the bed is mushy and the heating/cooling system is too loud - but it could be a lot worse.
• 12 midnight: Check email.
• 12.30 am: Go to sleep.
• 8.30 am: Wake up and get ready for meeting. (Note the eight hours of sleep!)
• 9.30: Breakfast at Waffle House!!! (Grilled cheese instead of egg and cheese - because of something I read in Michael Pollan's book - and a double order of hash browns. Yummy.)
• 11.00: Pick up colleague at airport. Drive to prospective client's neighborhood, which is a sprawling mass of strip malls just like thousands of others all over the country. Eat lunch at Panera (tomato soup and Greek salad) because of the free wireless Internet access.
• 12.30: Arrive at prospect. Do meeting. Talk about company and product for 19,378th time.
• 4.30: Arrive back at Birmingham airport for a 5.05 flight.
• 8.30 pm (Eastern): Dinner at Musashi in the Detroit airport (cold, rock-solid vegetable sushi and a limp, greasy, characterless vegetarian egg roll - and a banana).
• 11.00: Arrive at Hartford airport and drive home. Check email. Play with dog.