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Sept 11, 2009
8 years ago I was on an early morning flight from
Minneapolis/St. Paul to Kansas City. Although we landed on time we had an
extremely fast and hard landing in Kansas City without any explanation or
comment and the weather was perfect. My co-worker Paul called his then
girlfriend in Boston to say “hi” and to let her know he was in Kansas City –
the call itself was purposely mundane. However, Paul’s expressions, the wide
eyed reaction to what he was hearing on the other end caused me to interrupt
him several times with “What? What’s going on?” We would all find out 20
minutes later when we arrived at the airplane shuttle terminal (we were taking
a private plane to Bentonville, Arkansas). We saw the lives feeds of the
towers, the Pentagon and the stories of a plane in PA. We didn’t see the towers
fall or video of the towers fall until we arrived back in Minnesota later that
day (~ 6 pm) after renting a car and driving from Kansas City to Minnesota.
This morning, eight years to the day later, I find myself
once again on an airplane in the early morning. This time, instead of flying to Kansas City and on to Bentonville, I'm flying to Atlanta and then on to San Jose Costa Rica. Obviously the world has changed
since then (cliché I know – the world always changes a lot in an eight year
period), but my life it has also changed. Back in 2001 I had just earned my MBA
from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and took a trip of a
lifetime around the world visiting Paris, Prague and Pakistan (among other
destinations). I had started working, with a window office in Minnesota’s
tallest building, and felt life was great. Life was great, but now it is better. Costa
Rica can do that to a person. The people. The ecology. The beauty. Pura Vida!
I have continued to my hobby of photography – and there
aren’t too many places I’d rather be for that than Costa Rica. Take a look at a
small sample of my Costa Rican photos here on Flickr.
For the next 10 days I'll be updating everyone on Twitter and this blog. I hope to meet all of you down here in Paradise!