I put Hyderabad into my GPS...

...and my cyber-bitch said "I can only take you to the airport, the rest is on your own".

So at the end of February/beginning of March I will be taking a business trip to Hyderabad, India.  We have some fairly large operations there and our parent company is sponsoring an Operations Conference.

When I first heard, of course, my thoughts go to being away from my family and being really FAR from my family for about a week, especially since we're going to be on personal vacation for just about the two weeks just before this.

Then my thoughts went to the almost 18 hours in the air it's going to take to get there and I wondered if I would go stir crazy on either leg of the trip.

I've long been used to the eight hours to mainland Europe but on the last couple of trips I found myself getting very antsy about five hours in.  What in the world will I do for 18 hours?  You can only watch so many movies, listen to so much iPod, sleep so much.  Truth be told, I'm a horrible worker on a plane.  I can never get comfortable enough to work on my laptop plus I usually don't have an electrical outlet near me and for some reason the work laptop's batteries only last about two hours at max!

But eventually it has sunk in how fortunate I am to work for a company who wanted me at this conference and feel that my presence there is important to our longer term strategy and plans.

I'm also excited to take a day or two for personal excursions.  I'm not sure what all is around Hyderabad or even how close some of the favorite tourist spots are yet.  If you haven't taken a look at it in awhile, it's a massively huge country.  It's the seventh largest country (land area) in the world and the second largest by population.  On the Southern end it looks like there's some prime relaxation near a massive coastline and a short hop, skip and jump over to Sri Lanka.  Of course, to the North, you're heading up near Nepal and Pakistan.  What will NOT be lost on me is how close I'll be to Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq and as an American these are important spots in my lifetime.
Today we got a list of things we need to get done before we even THINK about heading to India.  Need to get a visa (what? MasterCard isn't good enough? I keed!) and so I have to submit my passport, copy of my driver's license, money (of course), 2 more passport-type photos, letters from my employer, our operations in India as well as a legal firm who works with the Indian consulate to get all this stuff done, oh and a short power of attorney-type statement for that firm.

 And if the paperwork don't kill ya', I gots to go and get me a whole bunch of shots (not the Jägermeister kind either!) to ward off whatever ails me or what CAN ail me.

So hey, if anything, there's gonna be some good blogging material over the next couple of months, plus loads of pictures!!  Stay tuned!