"Business" travel

I have a former colleague from IBM - actually IBM UK - who is celebrating his Quarter Century Club induction this year. (25 years of working at IBM) IBM still recognizes this milestone with a dinner for the employee. This friend of mine was able to get his manager to agree to allow him to have his dinner in the US since so many of his colleagues through the years have been in the US. I was surprised and pleased that he invited me to his celebratory dinner.

It is not in a city that we are planning to visit, and it is scheduled during the time that we plan to be in Dallas in April, so I decided to fly to the event and stay one night so I could attend.

Oh my - I need re-training on travel arrangements! Either that, or things have changed a lot! Of course, since I'm on my own dime, I don't have to adhere to IBM's travel policies.

One thing that I found interesting, when I was looking at rental cars, is that Hertz now has something called "Dream Cars":

Various Porsches

and Mercedes

Land Rovers, a Tesla...

Just for grins, I looked up the cost in the DFW area for these - here are the rates for 3 of them - just $128/day for a Mercedes convertible, and a Camaro Convertible is available for the bargain rate of $101/day!

I opted for a Toyota Camry or equivalent in the range of $28/day...

One other interesting thing - to rent a "Dream Car", you have to provide 5 forms of identification! I guess they really don't want one of those cars going out with someone that they aren't sure about!

I wonder whether they would rent one to my friend Mel....