Business Travels: Week 2

Well, I just returned from my second week of traveling around Nigeria on business and never thought it would feel so good to be back. This week wasn't quite as eventful as the last - very straightforward as far as the work went - although there were still some hiccups in travel, as expected. This week's travel consisted of Abuja and Port Harcourt. Our flight Monday morning got out just fine, as it was the first of the day and, therefore, didn't have much opportunity for delay. Our flight Wednesday morning was delayed about an hour, which is pretty good, all things considered. The only frustrating part about this was that we literally never got an update on the flight status. Our boarding time came and went, as well as our departure time, without hearing a thing. They finally just called us to board about an hour late. Wednesday, however, was unique in that the main Chevron locations in Nigeria all went on strike. There has been an ongoing dispute the last couple weeks and the union officials finally decided they wanted to protest (the whole matter was pretty ridiculous if you ask me). Anyways, this kept us from working in our designated location at all Wednesday and we had to wait until they called off the strike Thursday morning before we could go in and get our work done. Luckily, the workload was pretty light at this last location, so we didn't require much time to finish everything up and were actually able to catch a flight back to Lagos Thursday afternoon, a day earlier than expected. But of course, we weren't going to get out that easy... our 3:30 PM flight got delayed initially until 5:00, but we didn't end up leaving until closer to 6:00. And this was after arriving at the airport plenty early at about 1:15, so we had a nice long afternoon at the airport bar, which actually wasn't too bad; we were both expecting delays anyway. After another nice long and slow drive back from the Lagos airport, I eventually made it home around 10:00, so not all that bad. Just continuing to build that patience...

So, in conclusion, after two weeks of traveling around Nigeria, I'm happy to say I successfully made it to four of our different locations and have returned home safely (which I know the latter is what my mother is most thrilled about). This was absolutely a great opportunity in that I got to see and experience things I had never before, including some rather remote areas of the country. The hotels and guest houses were actually pretty nice and the helicopter rides were, of course, a highlight. Getting around Nigeria was certainly not an easy task though, and I have plenty more small stories I'd be happy to share with anyone. 'Twas a great experience and truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but one I must say I'm okay to not be doing again in the near future.

Lastly, here are a couple pictures I promised from our platform visit last week. They actually published these pictures on the Chevron Nigeria website along with an article about our visit out there (not in any way because I was there, but because the GM of Operations was our escort and he presented some awards to the employees onsite there).