1. Board Trip; Not Bored Trip
Time to rebuild the Kansas City Airport
02.05.2016 - 02.05.2016
Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Monday, May 2, 2016
B4 serves on a Board of Directors that has decided, for the first time, to hold its quarterly meeting outside the U.S. They have chosen a market where their satellite European headquarters is located: Lausanne, Switzerland. The timing could not have been more interesting: we are moving in three weeks and we are attempting to seal the deal on the impending sale of real estate we own. Not stressful, not stressful, not stressful; that is our mantra. I decided that I would not blog on this trip but was overruled by B4's friends who kept complaining to her that our entries were not coming through. So, these first few entries are written ex post facto.
We fly from Kansas City to Chicago O'Hare.
At O'Hare, we wait a bit, and then climb aboard a British Airways 747 and settle into a pair of rear-facing seats for an overnight flight to London Heathrow. I normally set my watch ahead to "destination time" and sleep on eastbound overnight flights but, for a reason I cannot explain, I decided to enjoy the fancy meal and watch an Academy Award nominated movie I missed at the theatres and had been wanting to see: “Straight Outta Compton.” B4 was occupied with “a few hundred” email replies and, what can I say, we both barely squeezed two hours of fitful sleep out of the eight hour flight.
We land at Heathrow at 7:45am after nearly no sleep and make our way to the BA business class lounge for some coffee and breakfast. On the way, we ran into Vince, an executive at the company, who was making the same journey. After a short under-two-hour layover, we're off on another BA flight—this one only an hour and three-quarters long, to Geneva.
After a quick immigration check to get our passports examined and stamped, Vince, B4 and I are greeted by a driver who shuttles us on the forty minute drive to Lausanne. Along the way, we see many fields of bright yellow flowers which we believe to be rapeseed, the third largest source of vegetable oil in the world (after palm and soybeans).
Problem: we broke our own rule and didn't sleep on the way here.
