My wanderings around the state have come to an end, and not a moment too soon.  I do enjoy the traveling, but there comes a point when you’re in yet another hotel chain that looks like any other hotel chain (LaQuinta?  Fairfield Inn?  Hampton Inn?  Is there a difference?) when you realize that you simply can’t face one more morning with Faux News blaring in the background over another styrofoam plate and plastic fork breakfast featuring KAW-FEE brand coffee bean product and individually wrapped English Muffins (which are neither English nor muffins.  Discuss).

There is the occasional quirkiness to be had.  Despite the fact that San Angelo–which only two years ago was proudly putting in all of its tourist literature that it had the highest murder rate west of the Mississippi between 1850 and 1870–is now trying to bill itself as the culture capitol of the Panhandle Plains (a title that is disputed by … well, no one), the town is relatively uninteresting.  A tour around town on a Sunday evening revealed a frightening number of businesses with Christian names (such as: Bible Automotive.  I’m not kidding.) and a dearth of business actually open to the public.  After eating Mexican food from a restaurant that clearly used to be a service station (the food wasn’t bad — Bobby Flay had apparently been there at one point), Natalie and I wound up at Baskin Robbins … along with half the town because, as I may have mentioned, there was nothing else open at 7 pm on a Sunday.

Then there was the unexplained psychedelic van (above) that I stopped to photograph on the way out of town.  And this place:

This place practices false advertising: there are no man’s for sale in the man’s shop.

My most recent trip ended a scant three hours ago with a flourish and flutter (literally: the woman sitting next to me apparently cramming for a medical school exam who had refused four requests to put away her book and notes for landing seemed surprised when it all flew up the aisle upon touchdown.  That’ll learn her).

We were over in El Paso, the one place in the state that, it is regularly agreed upon, we must fly to.  I’ve heard rumors that you can drive it in under eight hours now, with the speed limit on I-10 through west Texas now legally at 80 miles per hour, but I’m more happy to reduce it to an hour and twenty minutes on Southwest Airlines.

I have always liked going to El Paso — in fact, I’ve enjoyed all of our trips to the border area, both in West Texas and down in the Rio Grande Valley (for the uninitiated among you, even though technically El Paso is on the Rio Grande, the term “Rio Grande Valley” seems to only apply to the part between Laredo and Brownsville, on the Gulf of Mexico).  We usually get groups that are really energetic and happy to learn, and this was the case with our session yesterday.  One of the guys was so enthusiastic that he engaged me in conversation in the men’s room.  I am not a particular fan of the conversation-while-I-pee.  If you see me in the men’s room, please don’t strike up a conversation until I’m at the sink, OK?

It’s also saying something about the sort of people that Natalie and I are that we kept coming back to the five or so really negative evaluations we collected at the end of the day.  There were 68 people in the room–our largest audience ever.  The vibe was overwhelmingly positive, but we still kept coming back to those negative ones.  I think somehow we just need to validate that the criticism isn’t valid–we’ve gotten unenthusiastic comments before, but this time the people who didn’t like us really didn’t like us, and they weren’t shy about expressing it.

At the end of the day, though, this last trip was a good note to end the late summer training sessions on.  We had a new audience, and they seemed to be happy with what we were doing.  The people who invited us were effervescent.  And then it was off to have a nice drink in the historic Dome Bar in the lobby of our hotel, the historic Hotel Paso del Norte.

And now … I’m home.  Next up is a trip to a conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico toward the end of September.  Technically it’s work.  I just wonder if I can put sunscreen on my expense account