Doug's Exile To California Ends
When I returned to my home in Austin after my trip to Australia and New Zealand, I found a message on my answering machine from a client of my former company (SSI). It seems they were moving from the SSI software to a billing system from another vendor and wanted my assistance during the transition.
The job was to last "a couple of months". So I thought, sure... why not? That will allow me to have some work done on the house to get it ready to sell, and put a little extra traveling money in my pocket as well.
A week later, I was in Los Angeles. On my first day at the office, we had a planning session - during which I realized that it was going to take longer than two months - I estimated it at six months.
As the project progressed, we had delays in delivery of the software from the vendor; we had management changing our priorities; and finally, we had new management changing to a completely different system from a different vendor. All these factors combined to turn my two-month stay in California into...
...almost two years!
Twenty-one months to be exact. All the while, my itch to travel was getting more and more intense. Not that I didn't scratch it a bit from time-to-time. Early on, my client sent me to Hawaii to meet with their software vendor. And, while in California, I made various one- to five-day trips up and down the Pacific coast -- including four trips to San Diego, two trips to San Francisco, one to San Jose, one to the Gold Country (north-central California), and a couple of motorcycle trips to Yosemite National Park (returning along the coast on Highway 1). Add to that a trip to England with girlfriend-at-the-time to visit her parents, and a three-day sailing trip to the Channel Islands, and you can see that I didn't stay in one place very long.
My involvement in the project finally came to an end on December 17, 1999. With the holidays approaching, I knew it was not the best time to put my house on the market, so I decided to traipse around Europe for a month. Besides, I needed a break after the extended job in California. Little did I know, it would be another year (almost to the day) before I would finally depart the U.S. to begin the world tour I had been planning for so long.
