Thursday, April 17, 2008

Photo's from my study-trip

As I promised here are some pictures of my study-trip to Chicago and the Great Lakes. I can tell you we had lots of fun. Here are some pictures of Chicago

Chicago seen from the Sears Tower.


Same Chicago, only this time from the ground.
After a two days in Chicago, we packed our stuff and drove south with our three rental cars. That day we visited a distribution center of K-mart and a Steel plant in the afternoon. Both companies were eye-openers.
For all you non-Americans, K-mart is a discount-Hardware store which is a huge competitor of Wall-Mart.
The second visit that day was to Arccelor-Mittal, a Steel plant on Lake Michigan. We had a great tour there, those plants are so impressive! (and quite messy).
Tuesday (the next day) we went golfing with those cool golf-carts! I never thought golfing and racing with those carts would be that much fun!

After we totally ruined that golf course (you don't want to know how many holes I created while practicing my 'swing') we went to a warehouse of Caterpillar. This was a lot nicer to be than K-mart, what I experienced as a cold, greedy company. the working atmosphere at Caterpillar was much better, because they cared about their personel.
Wednesday we visited the Kenworth Plant near Chillicothe, Ohio. Quite an experience to be walking there. This is also the town where we went bowling. I have broken my personal record and set my all-time-high at a 175 points! (that's 5 strikes and 3 spares!)

The kind of trucks they make there. I even had the chance to climb in the cabin of one of these and played with the trottle!
After Kenworth we also visited Warren Rupp, a pump manufacturer, who was looking for some advice on their internal logistics. The last day of the 'company' days we went to a Ford-plant which was a bit of a disappointment.

During the trip we stayed in a lot of motels, but the one above was the absolute minimum. What a desolated, empty place!
On the day before our depature we went to a White Sox-game. Quite a scene to be, eating crack a jacks, hotdogs, watching the game.
Anyway, this was just a small selection of the obscene amount of photos I took.

6 comments:

cybrbeast said...

Very nice, glad to see you had a good time.
Cool panoramas also, though IMO the resolution can be made a bit smaller, hard to get an overview on huge pix, especially in-browser.

pimp-a-lot bear said...

Is it small enough?

cybrbeast said...

Perfect!

annom said...

:) Great panoramas!

Were you allowed to take pictures inside companies?

Where is the fat people gallery?

pimp-a-lot bear said...

sometimes it was allowed, sometimes with some conditions (no personel, not the super secret test facility) and sometimes it was forbidden.

I'm not completely comfortable posting pictures of strangers only because they're fat, maybe you can convince me.

Also photographing all those obese 'creatures' didn't feel as good as I hoped it would.

Kamiel said...

interesting read and some nice panorama's.

Inspiring hotel when i die i wand my ash scattered over that parking place.