One thing I really like about my job is the fact that at least once every month--especially in the summertime--or certainly by every second or third month, I know I'll be traveling from our magazine's West Coast satellite office, to one or several locations anywhere in the United States...or the entire WORLD, for that matter (I kicked off 2008 with a trip to visit Nitto Tire's facility in Japan). In my case, "business travel" involves covering an NMRA event and/or working on tech projects with different Mustang shops around the country. It's part of what I do here, I just hope you all think I'm doing it well.
Today is officially "Day One" of my latest trip: a week-and-a-half venture to several of our southern states (Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky) and a stop in the midwest (Illinois) before I head home. Getting started on this junket involved some funky flight logistics (notice the boarding passes of multiple airlines), which routed me through San Francisco.
Normally, I try and fly to-and-from destinations as directly as possible and avoid sometimes lengthy layovers that prolong arriving at my final destination. For this trip, the layover I had wasn't all that bad at all. Why? The answer lies beyond the now-famous "jump"...
As a norm, our business trips usually are, "all 'Stangs, all the time." In my case, a 'Stang-related reunion, dinner and great conversation were made possible by my long layover in San Francisco.
When I arrived in 'Frisco, I made a call to my long-time Mustang buddy, Norman Chang, and let him know the layover situation. For those of you who don't recognize the name, Norman is one of the Cali-based 'Stangbangers who make up the West Coast's original group of true, hard-core Mustang racers.
I met Norman and a few of his NorCal buddies back in 1999, at the NMRA's first attempt at holding an event in Phoenix, Arizona. In the years after that meeting, we kept in touch, built better and faster Mustangs, and eventually we both started competing in the Pacific Street Car Association's events, with Norman and his 7.50-second/190+ mph turbocharged LX coupe winning the sanction's Outlaw Street points championship in 2003 (I finished second in points in Open Comp that year).
Those were fun times, back in the days. No doubt. However, although "change" is something that goes hand-in-hand with the passing of time, some things, like friendship, don't change at all. While I hadn't seen Norman in a long time, he made adjustments in his after-work schedule (wife and two young sons at home), and picked me up at the airport so we could go and have dinner and catch up with each others' lives...and, of course, Mustangs and Mustang racing!
The quick time to visit definitely made the layover a lot easier to take, and left me thinking back on the "old days" of all this stuff even more, as the plane made its way across the country.