A week in Spain - but not as fun as it sounds...

First of all, if you visited recently and noticed by blog was offline, I am sorry, your guess is as good as mine as to what was happening. I clicked the "republish" button and everything seems to be back up and functioning.

For the last several years we have participated with our parent company's annual Environmental Coordinator's conference in Phoenix. Due to the distance, we held a smaller conference for our European coordinators last year in Hungary that I was able to attend. This year my company has been spun off as a stand alone company under new ownership. As such, we were able to hold our first global Safety Health and Environmental Coordinators Conference. We hold these in close proximity to one of our 12 plants spread throughout the world. This year we were in Santander, Spain, on the northern coast.

The building in the middle was the hotel we were in for a week. The beach was a nice place to visit in the evenings (I didn't visit during the day due to the "more liberal European culture"). They did have a nice sidewalk that ran the length of the town along the beach and was a great running path.

A few things were hard to get used to. The Spanish culture doesn't eat dinner until late in the evening. Most restaurants don't even open until 9pm. Then, it usually takes between 2-3.5 hours to eat dinner. All week long I returned to my room sometime between midnight and one, called Jamie, and went to bed. Sleeping on a full stomach was fun...

Most of my tourism came during my evening runs. I would carry my camera and run along the beach to the various sites I could run to in under 30 minutes. I visited the Marina, a lighthouse, a small free zoo, a boat display of three boats they built in the 70's to recreate Columbian era Atlantic Crossings, and probably the most impressive site was the Castle of Magdellena. The castle was built in the 1700's as a gift from the town to the Spanish King as a place to stay whenever he visited Santander.

While at the castle taking pictures a young couple came up to me and said, "CAN... YOU... TAKE... OUR... PICTURE...?" with all the volume and hand gestures you can put with that question. They were a young couple from Iowa on their honeymoon and were quite excited when I answered in English that I would be glad too. From the way they talked they hadn't encountered another English speaking person for a week.

Ultimately, other than my hour long runs each evening, I spent the daylight hours of the entire week in either a conference room, a restaurant, or touring our plant nearby. Not exactly vacation but certainly a place I would recommend to visit if I had more time.

We also planned the next two conference locations. 2007 will be the Canadian side of Niagara Falls close to our Hamilton, Ontario facility and then in 2008 we will find a location close to our Trecate, Italy plant. My wife is already talking about ways to accompany me to that one. I'm sure I have more than one brother that will offer to come along and serve as tour guides / interpreters for that one as well...