Dallas.. Birthday Weekend

Although this doesn't qualify as ME traveling, I thought I'd post up some pictures of my birthday weekend.  Jenn came out to spend time with me.  We spent most of the time watching baseball (both our teams were in the league championship series') and football (we were playing each other in fantasy football; Jenn killed me).  We actually attended the ALCS here in Dallas (Rangers vs Jenn's Yankees).  Unfortunately, for her only, the result didn't go the Yankees way.  I also got her to take a ride on the back of my motorcycle.  I loved that; thanks babe.  Well, enough with the small talk, here are some photos.

Detroit... FBI

Detroit/Dearborn, MI was my latest out of town trip.... I know, how exciting!  I was there from October 3 to October 15 (I did fly home, highly unusual for me, during the weekend of October 9/10).  My hotel was actually in Dearborn, but my work was in Detroit.  There wasn't much to do around there.  I spent the day working, would return to the hotel to workout, go to dinner, then crash.  The funniest part of the trip was the car Avis gave me for the first week (see picture).  We were totally FBI rolling around.  I think having this car helped keep us out of trouble while rolling around town.  Here are my few observations of Detroit:

- 99 out of 100 cars are, as expected, American made vehicles.  Our hotel was across the street from Ford, but it took me a couple of days to realize that there foreign cars are a rarity around these parts.  The second week, we had a Nissan Altima and we were getting some nasty looks while driving around.  Heck, someone decided to dispose of their chewing gum on our lights.

- Police activity is HIGH.  We saw red/blue lights EVERY day (I'm pretty sure).  

- Garlic butter is in high demand.  So if you've ever been to Benihana's (I have been more than plenty), you should know that they add some garlic butter to the fried rice (and some other stuff).  Well, in Dearborn, they don't just put a table spoon or two into the rice, they put near a gallon (due to demand by the patrons).  Even that wasn't enough, the other guests would continuously ask the chef and server for more.  I asked the server after dinner if this was unusual, and she told me that this Benihana's and another a couple of town over go through the most garlic butter in the company (more than 10 times other locations).  WTF???  I also noticed that people order about 3-4 orders of the fried rice to take home.

That's all.  Sorry for the boring last couple of trips.  I have some more interesting travels coming up: South Africa later this month and into November, Los Angeles for Thanksgiving, San Diego for the 49ers/Chargers game in December, the Bay Area and Wine Country for Xmas/New Years and Thailand in January.  Stay tuned.