Barcelona by Mountain Bike

Sunday September 11th

Today was a good day. I wasn't sure that it was going to turn out to be this morning, but it turned out OK. Nothing in life is free. That was certainly the case with the dinner that Messaging Architects treated us to last night (which again, I am still very grateful for). Somewhere during dinner though I committed to showing up at Brainshare at 10 AM to help Svetlin troubleshoot some problems that he was having with the VMWare image for the demo. I also committed to a meeting at 11 AM to get an overview of Messaging Architects products so that we could plug them during the migration demo.

Had I not made those commitments we weren't scheduled to do anything until 1PM when we needed to show up for a brief Brainshare meeting with Ken Muir, the director of GroupWise and then would have had the rest of the day to play in Barcelona. By midmorning I was slowly starting to see my relaxing Sunday starting to melt away. Svetlin was a little late showing up and when he finally did we didn't catch him right away. It was 10:45 by the time that we all met up.

We were supposed to meet Greg from Messaging Architects in the solutions lab for our 11 o'clock meeting. Unfortunately, the conference center event staff kicked us out of the solutions lab just before 11 because they were worried about safety as they were making adjustments to the scaffolding that held all of the lighting for the show. When Greg showed up at 11 noone was in the solutions lab, we were all in the migration lab. It was after noon by the time that we finally hooked up Greg. Just when I finally managed to get everything lined up for the Messaging Architects product overview I couldn't find my 3 co-workers who were also supposed to be sitting in on the training (it turns out that they went out to lunch without me).

Before I knew it our 1 hour 11 o'clock meeting had turned into a 1:30 PM meeting and ended up lasted for nearly 3 hours. It was 5 PM by the time that I finally left the conference center. And I was glad to be out. Officially I was scheduled to work the migration lab from 6 to 9 PM. However, since the migration lab didn't open until Monday morning I got the night off. If I hadn't already worked most of the day I probably would have just worked my shift in the solutions lab instead of the migration lab.

Although my morning wasn't an ideal morning spent in Barcelona, at least I can say that my missions were accomplished. We figured out the problems that Svetlin was having with the migration (it turned out to not be a problem at all), we got a fairly in-depth demonstration of the Messaging Architects' products and we managed to do a dry-run of the migration demo.

The fun really began in the evening. When I got back to the hotel I called up a bike rental place and rented a mountain bike. They delivered it to my hotel about 45 minutes later. I decided that my first ride would be down to the beach on the mediterranean coast. I probably rode down 5 or more miles of beach. I stopped at a beach bar and had a few beers before walking through the tide on the beach. It was awesome.

I stopped back at the hotel briefly around 8:30 to see if anyone had called with plans for dinner. No one had. The lab closed at 9PM and I figured that if I just camped out at one of the exits that I would run into someone from GroupWise. So, I rode back to the conference center and camped out. Within 15 minutes the whole team that was working that night walked out together. They told me that we were going out to dinner at “La Gavina” in Port Olympic.

Since we had just eaten in Port Olympic the previous night and I had ridden past it earlier in the day I felt pretty comfortable that I could find my way on the bike. The only problem was that when I got to Port Olympic I couldn't find any restaurants called “La Gavina”. I must have asked half a dozen people and none of them had ever heard of it. As I poked around for people who spoke English I got pretty good at uttering the phrase, “Hablo Ingles?”.

I finally found someone who knew where “La Gavina” was but he was only able to mutter a few words in English. I did manage to make out that the restaurant was not in Port Olympic. He told me that it was in a port up the road. It sounded like he called it “Port Aquis”, although I think that may mean “Next Port” rather than refer to the actual name of the port.

I rode around for a couple of hours before finally giving up. At some point I realized that even if I managed to find the restaurant that everyone that I was trying to meet would already be long gone. The night wasn't a total waste though. It was pretty cool to ride through Barcelona all lit up at night. I stumbled onto the “famous” statue of Columbus in the city center before turning around.

I stopped at a bar on the beach for dinner and liquid nourishment. Since I hadn't had lunch and had been riding for the last 5 hours I was pretty famished. Dinner was pretty light but the 4 beers that I had definitely weren't. I wonder if you can get a ticket for driving a bicycle while intoxicated. I'm just kidding, I wasn't that drunk. In fact, I only just barely had a buzz going. But the beer tasted awfully good after all of the riding that I had done.

I got back to the hotel at about 12:30 AM. A few minutes later Scott Brown knocked on my door and let me know what happened. It turns out that they got bad directions to the restaurant. They ended up spending quite a bit of time finding the place as well. Scott showed me where the restaurant was on my map. Ironically I had ridden right past it and just didn't notice the sign. I didn't feel so bad when Scott mentioned that the sign wasn't very visible from the road.

Now it's time for bed. I think that I'm going to wake up early tomorrow and go for a swim in the ocean before working my shift. Good night.