Greg Wesson's Esoteric Globe

"Only a few weeks until you move to London. Are you getting excited yet?" a friend asked me a few days ago.

"In all honesty, I don't even really think that it's hit me yet. I know that I am moving, but my emotions haven't had time to catch up. I have way too much stuff left to do," I replied. When I took off the month of May to prep for my move to the UK, I was expecting a little more leisure and a little less of what I have been faced with, which is a lot like work without the paycheque.

I look around my apartment that is filled with 10 years accumulation of stuff. Last week I took 5 bags worth of clothes and shoes and 3 huge boxes of books to the Goodwill to donate, but I still have a tonne of stuff left in the apartment. I was going to try and sell it on Craigslist, but I soon discovered that 10 year old Ikea furniture is of little to no value, and the best you can hope for is that someone will cart it away from your place for free.

This week I have to start packing up the stuff that I am not taking to London (at least not right away). A subset of my remaining clothes, my CDs, some favourite books, a collection of photo albums and other odds and ends will all need to be boxed up and somehow delivered to a storage unit.

Whatever furniture I can't give away for free in the next few weeks will need to go to either one of two places. The first is a charity, which charges $250 to pick up the furniture (it's a donation to cover the expensive of the guys and the truck). Many people (myself among them) were surprised to learn that you can't donate stuff for free, at least not if you want them to come and get it from you. Any furniture that the donation folks won't take (which I assume will be my one crappy couch and my sagging bed) I will need to pay someone a further couple hundred to come and cart away to be recycled or trashed. I knew that collecting all this stuff was pricey, but who knew that getting RID of stuff would be so expensive!

I've also tried to get my future life in order. Now that I have my visa, I have been applying for positions. There are a few nibbles so far, but nothing concrete yet. I was hoping to have this all squared away prior to my getting to the United Kingdom, but always, I have underestimated the amount of time it takes to do interviews and get a job. *sigh* Well, at least I'll probably have some time to explore London in a little more detail when I first get there, as I won't have a job to go to during the days.

The other thing I wanted to do was get myself set up for banking in the UK. Strangely, it is proving harder to get a bank account open in the United Kingdom than it was to get permission to work there. Her Majesty the Queen and her government decided within 3 days of receiving my application that yes, I would be a welcome addition to the workforce. Banks, on the other hand, seem very suspicious of whole concept of someone coming into the country. Luckily I have a relationship here in Canada with HSBC, but trying to get an account open over in the United Kingdom still required me to fill out 6 pages of application forms that I had to sign in 5 different places. $200 and 2 weeks later, I will find out if they have accepted me into their "club" of customers. Keep your fingers crossed for me! I'd hate to be over in the UK will the ability to receive a paycheque but no way to cash it.

HSBC ad from my last trip to London. Who knew it would be so prophetic. Romance and Madness - it's the only explanation!

Not all is gloomy, though. A plan is starting to come together, though. Thanks to the internet, I have both transportation over to London and a place to stay when I get there.

I have booked a flight to London, leaving Toronto on June 3rd and arrive in London the next morning. I will collect my bags and take the Heathrow Express to Paddington Station. I wonder if I will run into the eponymous bear there? I will then wander over to the Paddington tube stop, and hope on the Bakerloo line to the Elephant and Castle Station, where I will change for the Jubilee line. I will take the Jubilee line to Willesden Green station, place a call to my new (temporary) landlord, who will take me to my studio apartment, which I have rented for a month until I can find a more permanent place to live.

Once I am in that studio apartment, though, I am not sure what happens next. I have stuff I need to do - find a job, find a place to live, get a national insurance number, find a doctor and find the nearest HSBC branch.

That first day though, I'm going to take it easy. All I'm planning on doing my first day in town is to find the nearest pub, have a small meal and a beer and let it sink in. On June 4th, 2008, I will be a Londoner.

Upon my recent return from Trinidad, I flew on an Air Canada flight that went to Toronto from Port of Spain, Trinidad via Caracas, Venezuela. We spent a total of 45 minutes on the ground in Caracas, and they didn’t even let us off the plane, so unlike Danny Glover, I didn’t get an opportunity to visit with Hugo Chavez.

After spending the night flying over the Caribbean Ocean and the United States of America, the plane landed in Toronto at 6 in the morning. I sleepily approached the Canadian customs booth with my completed Canadian Customs Form.

After pursuing the form, the pretty, blonde customs agent asked, “Where are you coming from?”

“Port of Spain, Trinidad.”

“That flight comes through Caracas, correct?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Did you disembark in Caracas?”

“No, they didn’t even let us off the plane"

“Hmm,” she said, looking down again, and circling in red marker the area where I had written that I had $0 worth of good coming back with me. “You didn’t buy anything?” she asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Why did you go to Trinidad?” she asked. I said that I had gone down for vacation, and there was a line of questioning regarding why I had chosen Trinidad (because the flights worked out for my week vacation), if I knew anyone there (no), and again if I had bought anything.

“Do you have any checked luggage to pick up?” she asked. I replied that all I had was my backpack. “You went away for a week with just that small bag?” she asked.

“A bathing suit, a towel and a couple pairs of t-shirts and shorts don’t take up much room.”

“Hmm,” she said again, and wrote down some cryptic red numbers on the back of my form. They always write down red numbers on the back of the forms when entering Canada. It is, apparently, some sort of code to indicate if a secondary screening was required, and apparently today it was determined that I should be screened.

A second customs agent questioned me again before I passed by the baggage claim area, where I was waved into a separate room for a check by a third set of agents. They unpacked my bag and looked at all I had which amounted to a bathing suit, a towel, a couple pairs of t-shirts and shorts, some toiletries, a hat, a flashlight (never actually used) and a camera. They asked more questions about why I travelled to Trinidad, how often I travelled and why I travelled. Eventually I was waved on and got to walk outside into the cold of Canada.

I understand completely the suspicion I aroused. A single traveller with no bags and nothing to declare flying through a couple countries where drug and money trafficking is an issue, so I probably would have pulled me aside too. I was treated well, so no hard feelings with the Canadian customs.

All three sets of agents asked me, “You didn’t buy anything?” This of course makes sense because that’s their job, however there was something more in the tone of their voice. The tone suggested that more than just ensuring I was following the rules of Canadian custom laws, they seemed surprised that anyone would go away and return with nothing at all.

I know it’s strange that I tend to return from most of my trips with nothing to declare. Most people seem to return from travelling with stuff they’ve bought. When I was in France in 2005, a few people asked me what I had bought in the great shopping city of Paris. “Umm, nothing,” I replied. Frankly, I can’t stand crowds in malls and most everything in Paris was pricier than back home, mostly due to the exchange rate between the Euro and the Canadian Dollar. Returning from Beijing, China, I brought back no knock-off bags, pirated DVDs or works of Chinese art.

I don’t return empty handed, exactly, though. I do bring back something from every trip, and strangely, it’s something that I left home with. It’s my shoes. More than any product purchased abroad, or even photo of a place, just looking at my shoes reminds me of the great trips I’ve taken. The mud dried on my shoes may be free to pick up, but it feels priceless to me.

In 2002, in preparation for my trip down to South America, I went out and purchased a pair of waterproof, Gortex covered day hikers made by Solomon. The next day, it rained, and so I went out and splashed around like a 6 year-old, testing the waterproofness of my boots (they were). Those boots took me throughout South America, trips to the USA, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands and three-quarters of the way up Mount Kilimanjaro, where my lungs gave out but my shoes were ready to keep going.

I loved those Solomon shoes, and was ready to travel the entire world with them. I had hoped that I would be able to stand on all 7 continents with those shoes on my feet, and managed to stand atop 4 continents with them on. I grew very attached to those shoes. They were like a security blanket. Wearing them made me feel outdoorsy and worldly. However, even the sturdiest shoes aren’t built to last forever, and soon I had worn a hole in the sole, which ruined both the waterproof benefit and any support for my foot.

In 2005, I replaced my Solomons with a pair of Vasque shoes that had many of the same qualities as the Solomons, like being waterproof, and providing both high ankle support and good arch support. Those shoes saw me from France to Hong Kong, a few stops in Central America, a bunch of trips in Canada and the USA. While wearing the shoes in Trinidad however, I could feel the bottoms getting mushy and I could tell it was only a matter of time until the ball of my foot wore a hole in the sole. With the support fading from the shoe, I started to feel pain in the balls of my feet, which after my previous experience with Metatarsalgia (an inflammation of the balls of the feet that comes from over-use, especially if one is wearing shoes without adequate arch support), I knew it was time for some new shoes.

I’m sad to see my old Vasques go. Like the Solomons, I’d grown unusually attached to them. I always felt like a traveller when I put them on. They provided more than just physical comfort. They were emotional comfort as well. I always felt I could face anything that came my way when in a nice comfortable pair of shoes.

So today, I went out and bought myself a new pair of shoes. Unlike the experience of replacing my Solomons in 2005, when I was unable to find any Solomon shoes that were like my old ones, I managed to find the exact same “model” of shoe. The only difference is that instead of yellow stripes on the fabric eyelets for the laces, there are orange stripes.

So I have a new pair of shoes, and after a short period to break them in, I am sure I will feel ready, both emotionally and physically to take on new adventures in this big world.

The Details
Name: Greg Wesson
Current Residence: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation: Consultant
Hobby: Travel

Why Travel?

I never traveled much when I was younger. Other than day trips, the only trip I took as a kid was a 3-week road trip with my parents from Toronto to the east coast of Canada. I didn’t get on a plane for the first time until I was 16, and even then it was just an hour-long sightseeing trip in a 4-seat seaplane. During university, I only took one spring-break trip, myself and some friends drove from London, Ontario to Shawnee, Pennsylvania for a ski trip. My first commercial flight was when I was 25 for a business trip to Moncton, New Brunswick.

Travel sounded like something fun, but it was always something for later. There was never enough time or money. There was always something else that I needed to do. But then the world changed.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1999. My mother was 65 and had just been retired for 9 months when she died. At the time I was stuck in a job I hated, spending 50 to 60 hours a week doing tedious work for people I didn’t really like. I put myself in my mother’s place – imagined myself 35 years in the future, at 65 and newly retired. If I were diagnosed with cancer, would I be sitting there thinking about all those things that I had said, “next year, next year, next year?” I quit my job and decided that I wouldn’t put off those things that I wanted.

I realized that the things stopping me from traveling wasn’t the money or the time or any of the things I needed to do. It was that I was scared. Scared of putting myself out in an unfamiliar world.

I remember sitting in my office on a seemingly average Tuesday morning in September of 2001 when someone said, “an airplane hit the World Trade Center.” It was September 11th, 2001, and as the details of the day revealed themselves, I remember one main thought kept going through my head, “I would hate to die at work.” I thought to myself, as I sat watching the replies over and over on CNN, “what if that had been my office building?”

There is no time like the present. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. None of us knows if we have a tomorrow.

It was tough, booking my first big trip to South America. I almost backed out a few times, but I went through with it. At times, I felt stupid, the 32 year old backpacker. Isn’t backpacking for college kids? I certainly was actually stupid a few times, but it was also one of the most fun and most liberating experiences of my life. And as to backpacking being a college kid thing, most of the people I met on the road were my age or older.

I am not an extreme traveler. I have met people on my travels that do it month after month, year after year. I still am afraid sometimes, and still doubt that I have what it takes to get out there. Staying off the road, though, is not an option. Sometimes I get tired being on the road, but after being home for a few weeks, I start getting the hankering again. Its time to go to the bookstore, visit the travel section, and pick a lonely planet guide off the shelf.

Twelve Hours Is A Long Commute

I was standing at a urinal that, via the rubber urinal cake holder was informing me that I was in at Eppley Airfield, the world’s cleanest airport. The speaker above me cracked to life, “Attention passengers on American Airlines flight 4276 to Chicago, the inbound aircraft has not yet left Chicago. We expect that the plane should land at approximately 2 o’clock, and that it should take about 15 minutes to turn the flight around, so the flight should now be leaving at 2:15 P.M. There are thunderstorms to the west of O’Hare, and a number of flights in Chicago are delayed. For passengers who are connecting in Chicago, it is quite likely that your connecting flights are delayed, so you could still make your connecting flights.” An hour and ten minute delay, looks like it was going to be a long travel day.

Even before my mother died, I was already a seasoned business traveler. I have over the past 6 years worked for two “Big Five” consulting firms – Accenture and BearingPoint. The Big Five used to refer to the accounting and consulting firms Arthur Andersen, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the five largest professional service firms in the world. (Actually, when I first got in, it was the big six, as Price Waterhouse and Coopers Lybrand were separate firms at the time). Despite the fact that most of these accounting firms have split off their consulting units into separate companies, or sold them to competitors, or just fail to even exist anymore, the term is still widely used. But even if the companies don’t exist anymore or have morphed and changed names a number of times, the lifestyle that a Big Five Consultant has remained mainly unchanged. Unless you are really lucky and get a project in town, that lifestyle is one of constant travel.

Basically, my job is to temporarily go to companies and help them with specific projects in their call center and marketing departments. The projects can last from as short as a couple of weeks to as long as a year. The companies can be anywhere. Since 1997 (my first year at Accenture) I have spent at least a month in: Detroit, MI, USA; Montreal, QC, Canada; Denver, CO, USA; Columbus, OH, USA; San Antonio, TX, USA; St. Louis, MO, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA; Atlanta, GA, USA; and Las Vegas, NV, USA, in addition to my home town of Toronto, Ontario and my current location of Omaha, Nebraska, at Eppley Airfield, waiting for my flight to Chicago.

I was headed home on a Friday from Omaha to Toronto. The week started early on Monday morning, with a 6:46 A.M. flight out of Atlanta to Dallas, and then on to Omaha. After five days in the office and four nights at the Club House Inn and Suites, I headed back to Eppley Airfield to fly back (via Chicago) to Toronto. I was scheduled to land in Toronto at 5:55 P.M. All told, the flight from Omaha to Toronto, including the time spent in Chicago was scheduled to be 4 hours of gate to gate travel time. When you add the 20 minutes from the office in Omaha to the airport, plus showing up an hour before hand to clear security in Omaha, a half-hour to clear customs in Toronto and the 30 minute drive home from Toronto’s airport to my apartment, it would be six and a half hours door to door.

That’s pretty bad, but certainly not the worst I’ve had. Toronto to San Antonio was a one-stop, 6 hour ordeal, plus a couple of hours on either end for clearing security and customs. That was before September 11th. After September 11th, the time in airport has increased, making the usual hour I used to schedule for clearing security and customs has increased to 2 hours. Toronto to my apartment in San Ramon, California, outside of San Francisco used to take 8 hours door to door, and that was with a direct flight.

We finally got off the ground from Omaha at 2:30 Central time. Unfortunately when I landed in Chicago my flight to Toronto had already left, apparently not deterred by the weather that had delayed my Omaha-Chicago flight. The next flight to Toronto on America was scheduled to leave at 5:37 P.M., 2 hours and 10 minutes after my originally scheduled flight. I would now be arriving in Toronto at 8:00 P.M. At least I would miss most of rush hour. That would cut 10 to 15 minutes off my drive home. I went and sat at one of the airport restaurants, had some dinner and read my book. Being patient is one of the key attributes one needs when traveling every week.

So, too, is being flexible. My scheduled flight from Omaha to Toronto was the 3rd flight I had scheduled for this same day. Originally, I was flying from Atlanta to Toronto on that day as part of a massive routing from Toronto to Omaha, Omaha to Las Vegas, Las Vegas to Atlanta and Atlanta to Toronto. Two days before the outbound flight, my plans changed and instead of going to Omaha and Las Vegas, I was needed in Atlanta. So I booked new flights from Toronto to Atlanta and returning to Toronto. Then, after I arrived in Atlanta, it was clear I was actually needed in Omaha. So, change number three happened – Atlanta to Omaha followed by a flight from Omaha to Toronto. Certainly I think my skills in designing and installing call center systems is good, but my true skills lay in finding flights and hotels in short order. A fellow co-worker at BearingPoint said that our true “core competency” is not consulting, but rather is traveling. No one can plan a business trip and execute it quicker and with more aplomb than a Big Fiver.

No planning, however, could have helped me in Chicago. The 5:37 departure got pushed back and back and back. We changed gates 3 times. Finally, the plane left just before 9:00 P.M. central time.

We landed in Toronto after 11:00 P.M. I cleared Canadian customs, got into a cab and was home just before midnight Eastern time. I left the office in Omaha just after 11:30 central time (12:30 eastern time), so that means my original 6 and a half hour commute had almost doubled to near twelve hours. I sat down on my couch and popped open a cold beer. In twelve hours I had finished a book, completed the U.S.A. Today crossword puzzle and collected 1000 air miles on my American Airlines AAdvantage program, taking my total to 24,908 miles. That’s only 92 miles away from gaining a free flight from my hometown to Toronto to somewhere in Canada or the U.S., like say, Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, the world’s cleanest airport. That’s not a bad deal for 12 hours of my life, is it?