Sorry for my lack of blog posts Thursday, Friday and Monday. My 13-year old niece let me know she HAD NOTICED! So I better get with it. And now I am out on meetings on the Eastern Plains and I FORGOT MY LAPTOP, so I am at the mercy of hotel business centers. If I disappear for a few days again, you know why.

Last week was crazy busy with trying to get things done before I went on travel, knowing I was not going to be returning to the office for 7 weekdays, that is a LONG time. I had to have everything ready for travel/meeting on Friday, and more travel and meetings Mon-Thurs, before I left on my Tues/Weds trip. Aiiiiii. Lots of thinking, planning, and staying late at the office!

I did have some time before I left to run some errands Wednesday morning. I am going to take off mornings to run errands in the future. I walked right into my Dr.’s office, had my annual blood screening test, and was out of there. I had my cholesterol tested and then went right to White Soul Brothers and had a potato bomb for breakfast. That is just wrong on so many levels, I know. And then I went to get my tires rotated and balanced, which took 12 minutes –awesome! So I had time to go home and do some job-related work on the computer before I headed to the airport for my flight.

If you are at the Denver airport, and have time for a sit-down meal, I recommend Chef Jimmy’s in concourse A. Even for a sit-down place, they are pretty quick, and they have excellent quality food. I had an excellent Panini, with a side of fruit (healthier than many options at the airport) and also got one to go for my travel companion who was running behind. I have also had the calamari and the tomato soup here, they are both excellent, although the calamari used to come with fried pepper rings too, and I think they have discontinued that.

Warning: The Denver airport is going to be under construction, adding a rail line and hotel, for the next 5 years or so. Traffic and parking may be higgledy piggeldy. You may need to get to the airport even earlier. I had decided to park in covered parking since it was such a short trip, and the parking garage was full, even though the signs out on the road to the airport didn’t say that it was (the signs actually appeared to be totally out of order.)

My Tues/Weds trip to was to Bozeman, Montana. I had been there for a meeting before, and remembered it being beautiful. It IS beautiful, Bozeman nestles in a mountain valley, surrounded by mountains on every side, it is gorgeous.

We stayed at the Homewood Suites, which is a great hotel, and they have a reception and food every night. You can pretty much make dinner out of that if you want to, except for the fact that on Tuesday night, it was BBQ beef on a bun. Have I expressed my feelings about BBQ beef on a bun? Now, I am the daughter of a rancher, so I do eat beef whenever I can, from carpaccio to tartare to a medium-rare steak. But I also go to a lot of meetings for my job, and a really easy thing to prepare to feed a crowd. In one 3 day stint of 9 meetings, I think we had BBQ beef on a bun four times. That is too much BBQ beef in 3 days. So now I very rarely make it at home (mostly during the winter, when I am not at meetings so much), and I tend to cringe when I see it coming.

We got our meeting schedule started early this summer, with a special event last week. We had a lunch and a dinner meeting, and we had BBQ beef on a bun at both (well, one of them might have been pork, but when it is slow cooked and covered in BBQ sauce, they are pretty similar.)

So I am anticipating next week’s meetings and thinking how much BBQ beef on a bun I will eat, and I wasn’t ABOUT to eat it at the hotel. I don’t make the arrangements for all the meals on this trip, but the one did set up with the caterer, I plead for my life: Anything but BBQ beef, please!

So anyway, I think I am done with my BBQ beef on a bun rant.

In Bozeman, we ate at Ted Turner’s Montana Grill.  This was the original location for the restaurant chain. I had never eaten at one before. It was OK but not the best meal I have ever had. The kitchen is never the best when it is dealing with a table of 20. The drinks were excellent, however. They had a huckleberry margarita (huckleberries are a local item in Bozeman) that was excellent. I had two. I had the beef filet and a baked sweet potato and the squash casserole. They were all fine, but nothing I would go out of my way to eat if there was a non-chain place to choose from. The squash was summer squash, it was pretty good.

My phone is refusing to send a picture of the steak, it will only send the drink. Hmmmmmm.

I taught a Facebook class that afternoon to folks who were there for the meeting, hopefully I taught them more than I confused them. We had an hour reserved, and we could have easily gone for two hours, so we are talking about making a “Social Media Working Group” a regular thing before our meetings.

More on this trip later, have a great week!