Alliance, NE

Unnamed Bike Trail

Run Time: 61:04 + 2-minute kick

At first glance Alliance did not impress. A light drizzle and dark clouds greeted me at the end of a long drive from Ft. Pierre, SD. The hotel was old and somewhat rundown, and when the clerk told me the WiFi was out, that further dampened my spirits.

But a run can be a cure for anything, even in a light drizzle. It can take you to a place you wouldn’t otherwise find. This run started out dubiously. I cut across a field next to the hotel that turned out to be an organic mosquito farm. It got better from there. I took a path that dove under the railroad tracks and into an older neighborhood, on my way to a bike path that might get me off the sidewalks.

Which it did. And it took me past some beautiful old homes and parks and streams and ballfields and old buildings. Alliance, it turns out, is delightful, if you can avoid the mosquitos. The bit around my hotel was not so delightful, and I might never have seen the good part without the run.

The state bird of Nebraska appears to be the fly, which is not particularly large or troublesome there, just abundant. I stopped in the middle of nowhere an hour or so before Alliance to take a leak by the side of the road and made the mistake of leaving the car door open while I did so. I was still shooing flies out of the car the next afternoon as I drove into Denver. I got really good at calmly lowering the windows at 75 mph with my left hand and nudging flies out with my right.

My big victory for the day was yet to come. When I finished my run, I prepared to head across the street to McDonalds to use their WiFi for as long as I could stand to sit in McDonalds. I had forgotten to plug my laptop in the night before when I used it, however, so the battery was low, so I plugged it in to let it charge while I showered. I then called my wife for our evening chat, and as we talked I decided to check the hotel WiFi to make sure it really wasn’t working. When I looked at my WiFi settings on my phone, I saw the button for the Auto-Join Hotspot function.

I had never used my iPhone as a hotspot. I had never tried. It was an Epiphany. It worked better than any hotel WiFi I remember. I didn’t have to go to McDonalds! I could do all of my end-of-day work AND watch some West Wing. The next morning, when I got an unexpected call from a prospect and wanted to send him some follow-up documents, I opened my laptop and connected to my iPhone and sent him the documents right there in the Dollar Store parking lot. Game changed.

I know. You’re laughing at my boomer ignorance. I don’t care. I’m already twice as efficient and effective as a regular human – when something like this happens, it’s just icing on the cake for me, Bubba. When I need it, the spot will be hot.