I’m in Boston, Massachusetts right now for PAX East because I was invited to be a panel speaker at the convention. On my way here, I took a flight that stopped at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport because a flight with one layover was substantially cheaper than a non-stop from McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas to Boston Logan International Airport.

This wasn’t my first time in Minneapolis—I was there for X Games Minneapolis 2019 when Tempo Storm’s Apex Legends team competed in the EXP Invitational. To get to the event, I road tripped up with Jordan King from Lincoln, Nebraska, then road tripped back to Lincoln after the event was over. While I was in Minneapolis, I even had an opportunity to explore St. Paul, which was a unique and interesting experience.

One thing I didn’t get to do, though, was see the airport—obviously—seeing as we drove there. So, for the sake of seeing another new airport, I decided that a layover at MSP would be the best choice to keep my travels fresh.

Even the flight up to Minneapolis itself was an interesting experience. I had never flown at such a northward vector at this time of year before, so it was intriguing seeing such harsh and barren terrain when flying over Utah and Colorado.

I also don’t know what else I was expecting, but I was somehow slightly surprised for some reason at how much snow there was.

It was an unusually bumpy ride considering how clear the skies looked, and I nearly spilled my Diet Coca-Cola on my sandwich. The guy sitting next to me didn’t want his fruit or yogurt for some reason, and I was seriously considering asking to confirm if he wasn’t going to eat it so I could have it instead… but then the flight attendant beat me to it and took it away.

As we approached the airport for landing, I realized just how flat and spread out everything was. I imagine this would be a great place to drive a nice, big, lifted pickup truck.

Then came the true fun part. After I landed and deplaned into Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, I realized that it was probably one of the most unique and interesting airports I’ve ever been to. The best way for me to describe it is to call it a “lifestyle” airport, in that it was designed more as a casual get-together place than a place to efficiently move humans.

Now, my brain is all about efficiency and optimization, but I do acknowledge that different things can be “superior” for different reasons, depending on what you want to optimize for. If you want to prioritize a pleasant, comfortable, feel-good travel experience, I think MSP nailed it with their design.

The first thing I saw when I deplaned was a massive bar right in the middle of all the gates. I unfortunately didn’t capture a photo of it because I was just so confused at the fact that I had deplaned into a bar instead of a gate, but I did snap a photo later on of some interesting architectural and decorative design choices on one of the lower floors.

My layover in MSP was short so I didn’t get to see much of it (and I had a flight delay, but they were not very communicative of expected wait time, so I just sat at my next gate instead of exploring). But, if I do ever get a chance to pick where my layover is in the future, MSP is definitely going to be at the top of my list. I feel like I could spend a good hour or so just walking around the airport and taking in the sights.

For the past few days, I’ve been in the New York and New Jersey area for a family event. I usually don’t really take many identifying photographs or share specific details about my family because I feel somewhat of an obligation to protect their privacy—obviously not all of them live in big city condos with dedicated security staff like I do, so I don’t really want to do anything that may put them in any sort of remote danger. So, I don’t really have too many photos from this trip like I do for my work-related trips.

With that being said, I do have a small collection, most of which are from New York City, which is where I spent my final day before flying back home to Las Vegas.

On the way to the East Coast, I noticed that we had flown over the very edge of Canada on our way to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Of course, I pointed at Canada and proudly took a picture of the flight map, then sent it to one of my Canadian friends.

Now, if you’ve ever spoken with me in-person about real estate (or about just life in general), you will know that there are three places that I regularly flame as being terrible places to live: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and… New York City. I’ve been to New York before, but my past encounters haven’t really been too memorable or eventful, so I didn’t really have many personal anecdotes to back up my hatred for New York City, just the statistics of how expensive it is… and how impossible it is to find parking.

I am concerned to announce that the New York portion of my trip seems to have gone just a little bit too well, and now I feel weird continuing to flame NYC when it seems to have treated me quite well.

For lunch, I met up with one of our broadcast personalities, and out of sheer luck, there was street parking available DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF THE RESTAURANT where we were meeting. Better yet, it wasn’t just a normal street parking spot… it was a street parking spot that would normally fit 1.5 regular cars, which meant it was absolutely perfect in length for my RAM 1500 rental (yes, I rented a full-size pickup truck again). To top it all off, apparently street parking was free in that area on Sundays.

Due to my loyalty to Marriott, I stayed at the Courtyard New York JFK Airport. There was no self parking lot, and valet parking was $25 per day, but street parking around the hotel was free. Miraculously, I ended up finding a street parking spot for my truck by taking only two laps around the block, when I very literally expected to be hunting for a good 15 minutes.

Upon check-in, I got a complimentary upgrade to the 11th floor and received a little gift baggie with a bottle of water, two cookies, and a discount coupon for the convenience shop in the lobby.

Now, being in management is great and all, but one of the things that gets old fast is having to take care of your employees and contractors’ travel logistics. Luckily, we have mid-level managers now who take care of that for me, but I spent a long time doing most of it myself, so I’m “burnt out” of planning events at this point (if that can even be a thing), and always seize every opportunity I can for other people to plan my day for me.

(Yes, this does indeed mean that, sometimes, your boss might appreciate it when you think on his behalf tell him what to do so he doesn’t have to worry about it.)

Anyway, dinner ended up being an absolute dream come true, because the person I went with literally selected the restaurant, picked me up from my hotel (which she offered to do without me even asking), whisked me through New York City traffic like an absolute god, did all the ordering from the menu, and even cooked most of the meat.

The restaurant was similar to one of those all-you-can-eat restaurants where the grill is in the center of the table, except this restaurant wasn’t actually all-you-can-eat, so I was able to turn off the “get the most value for your money” switch in my brain, take it slow, and actually enjoy all the food.

… I actually enjoyed it so much that I forgot to take a picture until I was done and the busboy had already cleared off our table.

Now if my trip had just ended there, I would’ve probably just wanted to stay in New York City forever, but luckily, my airport experience was just barely bad enough that my signature phrase of “the best part of traveling is coming back home” still applied.

Upon arriving in Terminal 4 at JFK, I couldn’t find the Wingtips Lounge (the instructions were to “turn right out of security and walk forward 100 meters,” but doing so would have just walked me straight through the information desk), so instead, I went to the Air India Maharaja Lounge, which was unusually and uncomfortably colorful, and only had Indian food and a mountain of alcohol.

As I was preparing to get out of the lounge, I got a no­ti­fi­ca­tion that my flight had been delayed by an hour and a half. I had actually been getting amazing travel luck lately, so I think this might have broken about a 20-or-so streak of on-time flights for me.

Apparently, something had happened to the pilot and they had to fly someone else in from Baltimore, Maryland to operate our aircraft. After an almost six-hour flight, I made it back home to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas just before 7:30 PM PST, stopped by the Club at LAS on my way out for some non-Indian food, and made it back home about an hour later.

 
Only three days to rest—my next trip is on February 14.

Anyway, the Redondo Beach team house shut-down process that I mentioned just under two weeks ago was a surprising success—so much so that we finished everything up early, and Ed got to leave early on January 24 to make it back to the Chicagoland suburbs in time to spend Chinese New Year with his family.

Upon first arriving at the team house, the task in front of me looked next to impossible, but along with Ed’s help and the assistance of maids and other Tempo Storm employees and contractors, we were able to overcome the house full of garbage that was the PUBG team house.

I also took advantage of the fact that I was in California with a rental vehicle (I got a RAM 1500 Classic this time) by meeting up with various business partners and employees who I don’t regularly see. One of which was our branding and merchandising manager, with whom I met at the Spectrum Center in Irvine.

My home city of Las Vegas is obviously very artificial-feeling with very little green, and even Redondo Beach was mostly just misty and gloomy the whole time I was there, so it was quite the sight when I arrived at Irvine and everything was glowingly green and full of life. So much so, that I intentionally went all the way to the rooftop of the parking garage at the Spectrum Center just so I could take this photograph with the nice view.

The restaurant we picked was a Cuban restaurant called the Habana. Although I’m sure I’ve had Cuban food before, I had never been to a restaurant dedicated to Cuban food, so it was somewhat of a new experience for me. I actually don’t remember exactly what dish I ordered, but it was pretty good; the only complaint I had was that the rice was strangely salty, and I would’ve preferred the corn not on the cob.

The following day, I met up with one of my good friends, Doug Wreden, who goes by “DougDoug.” We met up in Beverly Hills so I could give him a tour of Tempo Storm’s new content house, then we headed down to the north side of the Santa Monica Mountains to a nearby sushi restaurant.

One of the final meals of this California trip was an order I put in through Uber Eats while I was at our production studio, where I dropped off the final load of computer and electronics equipment. If you know me, you know that I like trying new and interesting foods, and when I browsed through this Italian restaurant’s menu, I noticed a meat I had never tried before: wild boar.

I ordered some wild boar gnocchi. Unfortunately, I could barely even tell what the boar tasted like, because the sauce was way too salty, the seasoning was way too strong, and the gnocchi was a bit strange (it was the first time I ever had gnocchi, and I am not a fan of the texture at all).

I’ve noticed a recurring theme where, when I order some strange and unconventional meat, it’s usually prepared in some extreme way that completely drowns out the true taste of the meat, so I can’t ever actually figure out what it really tastes like. This happened when I tried alligator, where it was breaded so thick and fried so crisply that it just tasted like popcorn chicken, and it also happened when I tried rabbit, where it was drenched in so much strong gravy that I didn’t even realize there was meat underneath.

After handing everything over to the Redondo Beach team house property manager, I concluded another successful trip to California. As expected if you know my affinity towards early flights, I woke up at 4:30 AM to take a 7:00 AM flight back home to Las Vegas. It coincided well with the sunrise, so I tried to capture a photo from the plane, but unfortunately my phone decided to focus on the dirty airplane window instead of the sun.

The best part of traveling is coming back home.

It probably comes as no surprise that I’m back in California again… this time to close down Tempo Storm’s Redondo Beach team house. That house is the one for the PUBG team that I set up last year, and now that the National PUBG League is dissolving, we no longer have a need for that house.

Ever since Tempo’s recent staffing changes and undertaking of new projects, I’ve been pretty overwhelmed with work, so I contracted one of my friends to help me out with some of the tougher labor. If you’re a long-time follower of my blog, you may recognize him—it’s Ed Lam, known online as Grainyrice.

We both flew into Los Angeles because my truck is in the shop for, yet again, another transmission repair. Ed’s flight was scheduled to land at about 2:30 PM PST, while mine was scheduled to land at 2:51 PM PST. I told Ed to deplane and wait for me so we could take a shuttle together to Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Naturally, I beat him to Los Angeles, and I was the one who ended up having to wait for him.

Thus ensued the immediate difficult work of trying to clear out the disastrous mess that was what the players left behind in the Redondo Beach team house, as well as driving all over Southern California from Beach Cities to Beverly Hills to Hollywood to transport valuables from the team house to our other properties.

On our way back from Los Angeles to Beach Cities, Ed and I stopped by the Santa Monica Pier. I had visited the Santa Monica Pier once before during the night with Jordan Kelly and Jordan King, but this was my first time seeing it during the day.

The deadline for complete shut-down completion is January 28, 2020, and we’re just now starting.

… It’s going to be a long two weeks.