{"id":1568,"date":"2020-09-15T10:00:47","date_gmt":"2020-09-15T10:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wp_stories\/?p=952"},"modified":"2026-08-26T09:18:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T09:18:22","slug":"30th-reunion-road-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/?p=1568","title":{"rendered":"Notes on the 2000 30th Reunion Road Trip"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" style=\"border-top-width:2px\">Back story on these posts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am writing this post in January 2026 to give background on a set of 25 year-old emails  that I rescued from my old Cloudyhands website to publish here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here&#8217;s how I happened to be making this trip:<br>I left Autodesk at the end of 1999, and suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Harvard Class of &#8217;70 was keeping me WELL informed that my 30th Reunion was coming up! <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Long road trips are kind of a family tradition.  <br>Me and my mom did them most summers growing up in Louisville.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I was newly single so I could just pick up and go on my own &#8230; and a change of scenery for a few weeks would be pretty nice!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>One of the changes for the  new &#8220;single guy&#8221; me was to trade in the common-sense Peogeot sedan we had as a couple and to get a rough and ready a <em>Tacoma with 4WD<\/em> <em>with a camper shell<\/em>!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So LET&#8217;s GO!!!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From my time in the corporate world at Autodesk, I was still a Windows guy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every night I would cart my trusty Windows laptop into the motel room or friends guest room where I was staying and hope the wifi was good enough to send out the group email reporting on my day!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I still used Outlook for my mail. This was way before gmail was a thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I visited my share of small town libraries when the motel wifi didn&#8217;t cut it.  Looking back, those library visits were a treasured part of the trip!  <br>The stories were &#8220;published&#8221; as emails to a distribution list of friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" style=\"border-top-width:2px\">Back story on why this trip!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I graduated from <strong>Harvard College<\/strong> way back in <strong>1970<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So when the year <strong>2000<\/strong> rolled around, simple math tells us that my 30th college reunion should be happening back in <strong>Cambridge MA<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had attended a couple of earlier reunions: my <strong>10th<\/strong> and my <strong>15th<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the time of those earlier events I was living in the Washington DC area, so it was a simple matter of packing the car and heading up the Eastern seaboard for the weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 2000 I was living in far-away northern CA, so this one was going to require a lot more planning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" style=\"border-top-width:2px\">The Universe came together to make this happen<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>I left Autodesk in 1999. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>My divorce was finalized so I was thoroughly single. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I started working at a start-up in the City called <strong>LagunaStreet<\/strong>. \n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>LagunaStreet was fun while it lasted, but it didn&#8217;t last very long.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So suddenly I had all the time in the world to do silly things like drive cross-country for a reunion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The timing was pretty close though, I had a little over a week to plan it, pack the Tacoma and get to Cambridge MA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was still living in my pricy apartment in downtown Mill Valley, but I no longer had the software job to pay for it. Leaving it vacant for a month with no job prospects seemed kind of extravagant, so I sublet to a kid working at the Depot. That turned out to be kind of a disaster (<em>another story for another post<\/em> :), but that&#8217;s what I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" style=\"border-top-width:2px\">Technology in 2000<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Technology was different then. I publish this at the time as a series of emails from my pacbell.net account to a select list of friends. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>I would compose the emails at night in my motel bed.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I would watch the weather channel in the morning to plan my day.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Most motels had internet by then so I could shoot out that day&#8217;s report before I went to bed!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Pictures were with my trusty <em>Canon SureShot<\/em>. Every few days I would hit the Public Library whereever I was and upload my pictures from the camera to the laptop, and thence to the world!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Re-reading these, I had a much chattier style and seemed to be a more leisurely traveller back then.  Technology was different. I take time to drop into the local library to check my email and maybe write a little bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back story on these posts I am writing this post in January 2026 to give background on a set of 25 year-old emails that I rescued from my old Cloudyhands website to publish here. Here&#8217;s how I happened to be making this trip:I left Autodesk at the end of 1999, and suddenly I had a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[46],"class_list":["post-1568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-road-trips","tag-2000reunion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1568"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2816,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions\/2816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpgreen\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}