A travel diary by Rosa-Maria Penz


Week 1:

Arrival in „the city that never sleeps“. Light rain, hair still in place. I'm lucky to have visited NYC for a couple of times already. Nevertheless, I am struck again by its beauty. And thanks to the jetlag, one can make the most out of it.

Off we go in our fancy car to our first customer visits in New York State and New Jersey. Luckily, there's a Starbucks coffee shop around every corner and satellite radio works really well. So we cruise the roads with lots of caffeine and rock & roll in our system.

On the next day we leave for Canada, or rather Toronto. Among others, we pay a visit to our first Canadian MICROCON SMD customer. He has been super happy with us and our product for more than a year now. That's great to hear!

We spend the rest of the day visiting the Canadian part of the Niagara Falls before returning to the US the next day. This time, it's fantastic Chicago! It is a must for us to spend the night in the hotel on Wacker Drive, since the Innsbruck soccer team's name is FC Wacker. On an international level, FC Wacker is totally unknown but soccer isn't one of our core competencies anyway. We spend our Sunday admiring wonderful Lake Michigan and enjoying Chicago's world-famous "deep dish pizza", a dream come true for an Italian food addict like me!

Week 2:

Visiting customers in Rosemont, Sycamore and then Ripon, Wisconsin. This little village with approx. 8,000 inhabitants has a lot of industry and is therefore of interest for us and worth the journey. From there we go back to Chicago and fly to Texas – the first destination where we don't need our jackets and jumpers.  The fascination of the Lone Star State lies in the prairie-like but very fertile territory where the Texas Longhorn (my favorite cattle) roam, looking for food and water. After another tough business meeting with one of our customers, we head southwest to Arizona, in order to strengthen our business relations there. We gladly unpack our warm clothes since we're staying in Prescott Valley at an altitude of 1,500 meters and temperatures usually drop in the desert during nighttime.

We travel from Arizona to Nevada, and from there to our last destination, San Francisco. The road leads us across the Hoover Dam bringing back memories from the movie Fools Rush In with Salma Hayek and Matthew Perry – no intention to do product placement, it's just a nice movie.

Last but not least we arrive in "the city in the bay“. We don't miss this opportunity and drive across Golden Gate Bridge, stroll around Stanford Campus – hoping to get smarter just by being there – and feel really tiny compared to the giant Redwood trees. We also take a look at the headquarters of the most influential companies of our times (at least from outside) in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley.

After 197,377 steps and 103.91 km by foot, two intercontinental flights, five flights within Northern America and twelve customer meetings within eleven working days one can say that this journey has been a real success. Not only am I always grateful that our business model and strategy make it possible to visit customers around the globe. Apart from all the personal impressions described, this trip has been characterized by top quality meetings with customers and prospects which will definitely have a positive impact on our 2019/2020 business year. Lots of opportunities to grow in the North American market have opened up for Electro Terminal.