Here's a photo of my rental car and one of the hotel or at least the wing of it where my room is located. I actually have the ground floor, front room on the left in this picture.
I managed to get back to sleep after writing the last entry and got up about 9. After a long overdue shower, I had breakfast and got ready to go to the office. I tried to enter the address of 26110 Oakridge Drive The Woodlands into the GPS with no success at all. I tried all sorts of methods and eventually got a hit of Oakridge Forest Lane in Spring, which I knew was possibly the correct town at least. This turned out to be a private house in the middle of a residential area. I headed back to the hotel and after searching a couple of phone books and the Internet finally found it was Oak Ridge Drive. This time the GPS found the place, which was, as I suspected, not that far away. This frustrating exercise wasted more than half an hour and I’m sure I could have got there pretty easily using a street directory instead.
I met up with Tony who introduced me around. It was good to meet the people I’d exchanged emails and phone calls with over the past few years.
I set up my laptop and after a bit of a chat with a few people we headed out for lunch – at a Thai restaurant.
After lunch Tim, Brandon and I spent most of the afternoon discussing various problems and enhancements of particular interest to Tim, since he is on his days off and was in the office just to talk with me. It was soon 5-30 and everyone else had left so we did too. I did not actually start work on any of these today.
I went to the big mall just near the hotel and wandered around till nearly 7-30 and then found a supermarket where I bought some drinks and bathroom stuff.
About 8 I headed across the road for dinner choosing Genghis Khan – the Mongolian BBQ place. This turned out to be another restaurant chain – just one I had not heard of before. You get a bowl and choose your own meat, seasoning, vegetables, sauce etc which they then cook for you. It wasn’t too bad and I had a margarita as well. It has become a sort of tradition for me to have a margarita when I arrive in the US. Ok – “tradition” is maybe a bit of a stretch but I have done this the other 3 times I’ve come here. Last night I was just too tired to have one so I made up for it tonight.
Walking back to the hotel I was lucky not to twist an ankle or something when my foot went into a hidden sprinkler hole on the grass verge. I was OK but it gave me a bit of a shock.
When I got back ,I tried to find the laundry that I’d seen on the hotel plans. I asked a woman who was walking up the hall way. She had a worried look on her face and she said she couldn’t find her room and wasn’t even sure she was in the right hotel. I went to the desk to track down the laundry (it was on the next floor) when she turned up. It turns out she was not in the right hotel, which explained why she found somebody else in “her” room. There are 2 Residence Inns in the area with the other one just around the corner. This would explain why the GPS didn’t get me to this hotel precisely and why I got different addresses off the Internet from different websites. It turns out this is quite a common problem according to the girl at the desk, who then had the group of us there laughing at some of her tales.
I also noticed that we can get a free pass to a gym just down the road on weekdays. I looked at the exercise room in the hotel but there are only a few machines and no cross trainer. With no hockey for a few weeks I’ll need to do something else and it is very easy to over eat here. I f I don’t exercise it won’t be too hard to pack on a few kilos.
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