Traveling Thoughts

It has been a long and exciting week of traveling. I spent Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday in my old stomping grounds of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Fayetteville is the home of Ft Bragg and the 40,000 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division. It is also the home of Pope Air Force Base. I was stationed at Pope from 1982 until 1988 and I hated every minute of it. Fayetteville is the roughest town I ever lived in. The town and the base look a lot better now than it did 17 years ago when I left. Just to show you how bad it was when I left in 1988, my MBA thesis in 1987 was "The Reduction of Prostitution in Fayetteville, North Carolina 1977-1987". It was a fun topic with no shortage of police case studies of busted "Prostitutes" and "Johns". Fayetteville had the highest per capita murder and rape rate of any U.S. city over 100,000 in the 1970s. It is nice to see they really did continue the cleanup of the town. The downtown prostitution area burned down to the ground and they built the new police station and county government building on top of the remains of the most notorious strip bar in town, Rick's Lounge. That is one way to clean up the area. It has really changed.

I have spent Wednesday and Thursday in Charleston, South Carolina. I will be flying home tomorrow. Charleston is a very nice town, but I'm sure I wouldn't like the weather so much in July or August. We spent a nice evening eating dinner at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company in downtown Charleston. It was a wonderful meal in an incredible old historic town. I was impressed.

I fly out tomorrow and then hit the trail again on Monday afternoon and will be in Las Vegas, Nevada on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I am tired of traveling this week and will really be tired at the end of next week. It will be great to see my brother Steve and his wife Tracy in Las Vegas. I haven't seen them in about 3 years. At least I will be able to spend some time with family while I'm gone away from home.