The Broad Running Broad

Real life got a lot busier after that last post.

In order to tell you why, I’m going to rewind a bit to mid-July.

My manager emailed me and the two other underwriting assistants on our team about a professional development opportunity. For a week in October, if we were interested and got selected, the company would pay for us to go to the Underwriting Bootcamp in Phoenix.

I was in.

Which I emailed my manager back to let him know.

At the time I had just got my materials for my final course. I already had a goal to finish the AU courses before the end of the year, but with the bootcamp coming up in October, I decided to use that as my motivation to pass the last exam and get that designation.

A part of me thought it would be more impressive to be Allison Gallagher, AU instead of just Allison Gallagher.

I also figured there was a chance the areas I was studying might come up in class, so it could be in my better interest to have all the insurance stuff already in the vault.

Now we move back to October. Exam passed, flight and hotel booked. Early in the morning on October 5th, my mother had dropped me off at the airport for a 7:40 flight. The flight over was uneventful and we wound up landing in Phoenix about 20 minutes earlier, which was more than fine by me. With the time change we were there a little before 9 AM.

One of other AUs was on the same flight, so once we were off the plane and got my suitcase, it was time to get to the resort where we’d be staying and attending the conference.

Knights and dames, that week in Phoenix was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

I’m not going to go into a lot of details about the bootcamp, since commercial insurance isn’t known for being a particularly zesty topic. I will say that it turned out getting all the AU coursework done was a good idea, since most everything we went over felt more like an in-depth review instead of topics I was hearing about for the first time. So all-in-all the bootcamp was informative and helpful for my job.

But Phoenix? The American Southwest is so different from anything I have ever seen in my life.

The resort in reference is the Hilton Phoenix Tapatio Cliffs Resort. I’m having a time thinking of a way to describe the resort, so I’m just going to include some pictures here.

I told myself that I wasn’t going to waste a minute of the time I had outside of class, and I didn’t.

On Sunday afternoon I went down to the main pool and invited my coworker. The girls time was lovely, and we both couldn’t get over how different 89 degrees felt in the desert than it would at home (humidity.) My manager read up about the 138-foot waterslide at the pool, and I told him I wasn’t leaving Phoenix until I found it and took a ride.

I took six rides. It turns out water slides are easier rides prior to eating something versus after lunch.

I also discovered a flavor of Dippin’ Dots we don’t have in Ohio. Actually, I was doing a lot of eating and trying different flavors that week, all of which were delicious.

My early mornings were spent at the gym logging miles and walking up and down the hills on the resort grounds. The sheer amount of natural beauty in the hills was breathtaking. It turns out I have an affection for cactuses and all the variations they can come in. I took a ton of pictures and videos to send home to my mother while I was on my walks.

I climbed up the southern point on Wednesday morning to see one of the most beautiful sunrises. The night before I took a swim at the big pool to alleviate my wriggle I had in my knees and joints, where I discovered sunset and the stars look absolutely beautiful when you’re floating in the water looking up at them.

I have no idea how much walking I did in the mornings and evenings.

On Wednesday night after the reception the gang and I went out for a late-ish dinner at In-n-Out Burger, marking off the third of the four things I wanted to do while I was in Phoenix.

The fourth thing after the waterslide, a sunrise walk and In-n-Out Burger was finding and cuddling one of the Navigator Buddies at Phoenix Sky Harbor International, which my coworker and I did on Thursday when we were looking for Chick-fil-A. For those of you who didn’t know, major airports have volunteer therapy dogs for flyers who are feeling anxious about flying or need to de-stress after their flight. PSH has the Navigator Buddies, and I’m not turning down an opportunity to give a dog pets.

It’s been three weeks since the bootcamp. Admittedly, I fell in love with Arizona more than anything else. However, now that some of that excitement has cooled down, I’ve been thinking about long-term career steps. I’m not going to say what those are since everything is pretty firmly in the air, but a couple seeds have been planted for the 5 and 10-year plans. There’s a new drive that I’m going to act on.

And I’ve already promised Mom we’re taking a racecation in Phoenix. So we’ll definitely be back to the Southwest.

That’s all for today. Yours in life,

Allison