Actually, it will be a week-and-a-half by the time I’m finished, but so far… 1 day.

Usually I wait until I return from a trip before I blog about it.  But I’m compelled to provide some play by play action.  Not really.  I’m just grooving in the pub.  My wireless internet access apparently doesn’t work on the side of the hotel where my room is located.  The porter’s advice was to come here. 

Basically, I’m here to conduct a couple of disaster recovery exercises for a client at a couple of their locations here in England.

The trip over was good, aside from the 1 hr delay in take-off from Detroit due to a combination of de-icing and a de-icer-team shift-change.  But once in the air, I had a few glasses of wine while watching Rush Hour 3 and fell asleep just before the ending.

Once on the ground, I grabbed my bags and headed for Enterprise to get my rental car.  While doing the walk-around to identify pre-existing damage to the car, I pointed out to the kid that the steering wheel was installed on the wrong side of the car.  He told me it was that way intentionally.

From the time I found out about this trip, I was a bit worried about left-hand driving.  But after about 30 minutes on the road, I was fairly comfortable with it.  My Garmin NavSys came in handy too.  In fact, today I went to lunch with a co-worker (and drove) and she kept telling me to "turn right" when she meant for me to hit the roundabout then take the exit that pointed us 90 degrees from where we started.  At least the Garmin says "enter the roundabout and take the 3rd exit".

Right now it’s almost 9pm here (4pm back home).  I just finished dinner and am having a second beer at the hotel bar.  Earlier, I was making a list of my options regarding "things to do while I’m here".  My hotel, the Normanton Park Hotel, near Rutland Water, is pretty nice.  It’s better suited for a honeymoon or girlfriend-weekend than for a business traveler.  But one night I hope to get back here before dark so I can get some nice pictures of the lake and some of the wildlife around. 

So far, the only thing I’ve found to do on a weeknight is to visit Stamford.  It’s close.  But I’m told that most things will be closed by the time I would get there… so I’m not sure if I’ll make the effort or not.

However, for the weekend, I have a number of things to choose from:

1. Visit the Lotus factory/headquarters in Norwich.
2. Visit Stone Henge.
3. Visit York.
4. Visit the Lincoln Cathedral (as seen in the Da Vinci Code).

I’ll let you know what I decide.