Business Travel. If you do enough of it, you reach the point where “pleasure travel” becomes an oxymoron. I’ve been there. Believe me, it isn’t pretty. Especially if you’re married to someone who would like to travel … ummm … for pleasure.  When I say I’ve been there, the key words are “have been”. I hope. With any luck, I’ve successfully escaped, though I don’t want to get too cocky. I’ve seen what the travel Gods can do when you incur their wrath.

Let me point out once again that by the standards of true road warriors, my travel has been pretty tame. But even so, I have walked up to a customs agent and drawn a complete blank when asked “where are you coming from today?” Not a good strategy, I assure you. And I’ve seen budget restrictions, designed to eliminate everything other than essential travel, actually increase my travel. (Trust me on this one, it sort of makes sense, but only if you don’t think about it too hard.)

By now you are probably wondering where I’m going with this. Over the past few years my business travel has decreased to the point where I’m beginning to see things differently. For one thing, I’m no longer mystified by the concept of pleasure travel. In fact, I’m actually looking forward to seeing it expand over the coming years. But I’m also looking at business travel through a different lens. Quite literally. I’m increasingly on the lookout for unusual photographs on these trips. So when I found myself in the window seat on a turboprop plane, I kept my camera out. There’s something about a propeller that says “flying” in a way that a jet engine never will.

In the opening photograph I was hoping to see the clouds through the blur of the propeller. Instead, I was quite surprised to find that the camera stopped the propeller cold. I’ll end this post with a picture from our landing. One neat thing about a turboprop is that you can see the wheels as they hit the tarmac. I was trying to capture the puff of smoke on contact, and succeeded reasonably well.

I briefly considered posting these two pictures for the “Weekly Photo Challenge: Fleeting”, but in the end I decided against it. Perhaps I should have.