Working and playing in Europe

[Emily] I’m reflecting on my trip to Europe (May 2011) as I sit in my hotel for my last night in Paris. What a crazy trip this has been! It was exciting, challenging, fun, stressful, and amazing all at the same time.

I got the opportunity to travel for work; Carlson has ownership in a hotel company called Rezidor and a travel agency called Carlson Wagonlit Travel. The international tax team at Carlson files the US tax returns for these entities and their subsidiaries. With a co-worker, Liz, I spent four days working in Brussels, Belgium which is the location of Rezidor’s headquarters. Then we spent a week and a half working in Paris, the headquarters of Carlson Wagonlit Travel. We spent time working on tax returns, having meetings, and—the fun part—lots of “networking”. On a normal work day, we woke up at 6am and did not return to the hotel until 11pm. Even though I was tired at night, it took me about a week to adjust to the seven hour time change so I would often wake up in the middle of the night and feel like it should be daytime.

BWCA: really, really cold, and really, really dark

[Chris] This post recounts my second winter trip to the BWCA with my friend, Jake. This trip was in the middle of December, 2010. I could probably just say that it was really cold and really dark and leave it at that, but I’ll give a few more details…

Our first trip to the BWCA was a lot different than this trip (read the post from the first trip here). Seriously though, it was a lot different. Instead of packs, we took homemade pulks; instead of sun and warmth, we had 16+ hours of darkness and subzero temps; instead of having to walk through a foot of standing water from melted snow, we had to walk into blistering winds; instead of only wearing a light base layer, we had to keep every inch of skin covered and often pulled our hats over our eyes when walking into the headwind. We started out on Brule Lake for this trip and headed west.

I should back up a bit. We drove up north on a morning that was -27 degrees in Ely. When we got to the final turn toward Brule Lake we learned that the last 5 miles of road to the lake are unplowed in the winter. We drove the jeep over the snow bank and made it about 20 feet before we came to our senses and decided that another 4 miles and 5260 feet would be too risky of an endeavor. So, we started our day with a 5 mile walk to the entry point. After the drive up and unplanned additional trek, we only made it a short ways on the lake before we had to stop and set up camp. When I say “stop to set up camp” you may be thinking it’s evening, and maybe it technically is evening, but I’m saying we had to stop at 3pm since the sun set around 4pm. That makes for a short day of moving.