Justin's Blog

 Archive for the ‘Road Trip Spring 2007’ Category

Our final day and game were at Shea Stadium to watch our beloved Mets played the dreaded Braves.  Shea is undoubtedly showing its age, especially with the replacement Citi Field growing beyond the outfield fence.

Basking in the glorious sunshine it seemed that all was going well until the Mets Bullpen conspired to hand the game back to the Braves… Oh Well!

After 11 states, 47 hours and 49 minutes of driving, 2448 miles, and five baseball games we’re home!

:: Justin ::

Finally baseball weather has arrived as we are in Baltimore!

After a morning of email and postcards we headed out to explore Baltimore, having fun in The National Aquarium and the ESPN Zone.

Finally we went to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, this is one of the original “New Ballparks” and you can see that there are some things that other parks have learned since. The feature I like most is having a concourse that you can walk around the whole ball park and still watch the game the whole way.

:: Justin ::

We spent today introducing the folks at ResCare Lewisburg to ISPs.  It was great to seem them working out what the possibilities were and to see them work out how much more efficient they were going to be.

Now that we’re all done in West Virginia, it’s off to Baltimore to see the Orioles tomorrow.

:: Justin ::

I have decided that the Reds bullpen isn’t very good. They blew the game in the eighth inning due to the efforts of Coffey and Cormeir. In the last two innings the pair gave up a total of six runs on six hits, all earned. This pitiful effort came after a one hitter through six by Aaron Harang and a following scoreless inning by a middle reliever. I had good Sunday during the game. The people behind the stand loaded mine with almost everything they have. We spent the later innings in the uninhabited upper deck and talked an interesting person on the way out. It was a nice stadium but the structure was weird.

~Calum

Had a great day in Man, West Virginia setting up the ResCare folks down there.

It was great to finally get to drive through West Virginia is the daylight! Morag was right, it does look a lot like Scotland!

:: Justin ::

We started today in New Albany, Indiana just across the river from Louisville, Kentucky where we were very graciously hosted by Rauch, Inc. There we did a morning and afternoon presentation to INARF members with a visit to the Louisville Slugger factory and museum in the middle. The presentations went very well and the tour was fascinating. Next time I see Manny Ramierez batting I’ll be able to say “I saw that bat getting made”.

We then stopped in to do another presentation for the local ResCare folks before heading off to Cincinnati and The Great American Ballpark to watch the reds lose to the Houston Astros.  Finally a reasonably temperate baseball game!  After the game it was a long drive to Charleston, West Virginia to be ready for the next two days of training down here!

:: Justin ::

While folks at home are bailing out after a delightful Nor Easter, Calum and I were basking in the Indiana sunshine.  We started off the day stopping by and hanging out with our friends at Cardinal Service Management which included coming across the very cool sign above in Pete’s office.  We then went to look at a new group home that they will be opening this weekend, it’s great to see how people can now design homes that are both homely and functional (and have very groovy plumbing!)

After that we headed into Indianapolis where Pete and Cathy joined us for a presentation very graciously hosted by INARF.  Pete and Cathy must have answered a thousand questions – thanks guys!  Before the session I did a quick web conference for agency in Wyoming and their state surveyors, all of whom seem very excited about the possibilities ahead.

Then it was down to New Albany to be ready for tomorrow’s presentations.  I hadn’t realized that New Albany is basically a suburb of Louisville so Calum and I headed into town to look (from the outside) at the Louisville Slugger museum.  Hopefully we’ll be able to get back there tomorrow when  it’s open.

While driving around we’ve been listening to a bunch of audio books.  So far we’ve finished a John Stewart book on democracy and a John Grisham non-fiction book about a guy wrongly on death row.  Now we are working on Stephen Hawking’s Briefer History of Time and trying to wrap our heads around general relatvity – I’ll let Calum explain!

:: Justin ::

Had a great day today with the folks from Cardinal Service Management in New Castle, Indiana.  The highlight was getting to join one of this blog’s favorite people, AZ Soforenko for lunch (that’s AZ, Calum and me above).

Cardinal have been a great customer for a long time, in fact this is only the second time that I have been to their office (the first was after they had already been using the system for a year and a half!).  Today we took a look at billing and at attendance which they hope to move into as well as answering some questions about all the other modules they use.

They then, very graciously, hosted a session for other local providers to come and find out more about Therap so that hopefully we can start a new cluster of Therap users here in Indiana.

All that was followed by a delightful dinner with Pete and his wife.  Thanks to everyone at Cardinal for a great day, I’m looking forward to more tomorrow!

:: Justin ::

We got to see a ball game today, even though earlier we weren’t sure that we would. On the way to Jacobs Field in Cleveland we stopped off at The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

The game itself (Indians beat the White Sox 3-1) was a lot of fun (despite the cold) and we then headed down to New Castle, Indiana to start a week of training and presentations.

It’s particularly cool that our hotel here is right next dorr to Cardinal Service Management!

You can click on the photo above to see a bunch more

:: Justin ::

After a leisurely start to the day, we drove from the outskirts of Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.  It’s a great looking city that reminds me of Newcastle with all it’s bridges (think of the picture on the Newcastle Brown Ale logo).

Unfortunately as we got closer the rain fell harder and by the time we were at PNC Park, the game had been postponed.  This was distinctly annoying as it looks like a great park and I had heard great things about it.

Oh well, let’s hope they can get the game in in Cleavland tomorrow.  Tonight we went to see “Blades of Glory” much to Calum’s amusement.  I of course was not remotely amused by such sophomoric humour (just like I didn’t stuff my face with a massive bag of popcorn!)
:: Justin ::