Planning

I love the Arizona State Fair. Not “yeah it’s fine” love — block-out-multiple-nights, ride-the-SkyRide-every-time love. So this year I’m not treating it like a one-and-done: I’m planning several visits, each with its own mission — a food crawl one night, the demolition derby another, a concert, a kids-and-rides afternoon. This post is my running game plan so I can make the most of the whole month. The Arizona State Fairgrounds on McDowell Rd, with the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and downtown Phoenix behind. Photo: Gchiordi, CC BY-SA 4.0. ...

Different kind of trip on the board: a work one. I’m headed to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 — the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference — in Salt Lake City. It’s four days of Kubernetes, platform engineering, and the whole cloud-native circus at the Salt Palace. But a work trip doesn’t have to be all badge-and-ballroom: my rule is fly in the day before and out the day after, which buys two easy evenings and a free morning to actually see the town. Here’s the plan — logistics first, then the fun. ...

This one’s a big swing: the real Oktoberfest — not a valley beer garden, but the 191st Wiesn on Munich’s Theresienwiese, where the mayor taps the first keg and a quarter-million people say O’zapft is! on day one. This is a solo trip now: me, one bag, a festival plan, and enough flexibility to chase the quiet part after the tents. The soft landing could still be Weilheim in Oberbayern, with lakes and Alps close by, or it might bend west into Switzerland first so I can spend time in that small Black Forest town and make a proper watch hunt out of the route. Still very much in the planning stage — flights to book, a weekend to lock, and the countryside base to pick — but here’s the shape of it. ...