And Here I Am In Rochester

The flight into the airport at Rochester, New York, can be very pretty. The landing glide-path, at least as I experienced it, is over rolling farmland with quilt-like patches of farm fields, barns and homes, villages and small towns. The afternoon sun was shading into evening, throwing long shadows that set the landscape in sharp relief.

This was at the end of a brief, pleasant flight on an under-crowded plane. An hour’s flight is just right. Long enough to foster that wonder and joy that comes when you realize that you are flying, but short enough to avoid the tedium and discomfort of today’s cramped, coach-class airline flights.

I flew-in yesterday afternoon for the annual conference of the National States Geographic Information Council, known as NSGIC. The conference doesn’t start until later this afternoon, but we’ve just finished the 8:30 a.m. session and are on a short break before the next session. This group will meet constantly for the whole of this week. There will early morning and late evening meetings and a great deal of policy and ideas will be tossed around.

I have WiFi here and will blog during breaks. I hope to get some good pictures, especially as we’re going to visit Niagara Falls later in the week.

We’re in a Hyatt Regency in downtown Rochester. The Daughters of the American Revolution are across the way in the large ballroom. I assume they’ll wrap-up today and we’ll move into that room in the morning when the main body of our conference arrives.

I proposed that we try to join up with them as the “Bastard Step-Children of the American Revolution,” but there were no takers.