Tiring Travel
I’m finally flying home after a record three-week trip for work. Due to a conflagration of various meetings I had to be on the East Coast for the majority of November. I was in Atlanta during Election week for a meeting of the Mail Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), went to DC the next week for a summit on email authentication at the Federal Trade Commission (and to poke my head in on the IETF meeting), and then returned to Atlanta for the INBOX Email conference (didn’t even get a chance to attend Usenix’s LISA, also in Atlanta). You might say that November saw a perfect storm of meetings.
Being comfortable with extended travel ever since I was a kid, I thought that it might be easier/cheaper/more fun to just combine these all in to one mega-trip, booked a round-trip in and out of Atlanta three weeks apart, and made plans to visit friends and bring Alexis out for a weekend in DC. I was mostly wrong on all three counts.
It seems as I’ve moved to the next phases in life, being at home has become more important to me. Back in college I could never fathom the idea of taking a week of vacation from work and just staying home; now I somewhat relish the concept. I like traveling to and seeing interesting new places, but most of the business travel I’m doing these days is to places which are neither interesting nor new.
Its definitely not all bad. I’ve been seeing a lot of old friends who moved far away, getting to explore different parts of the country with my wife and with others, but in general I think I’m going to make an effort to turn my US business trips in to tactical strikes on meetings instead of longer planned stays. Contrasting my mod after this trip with an even longer six week period this summer where I was somewhere different every week, I was much happier when I was home each weekend and away from it three nights or less a week.
This is just a shift in priorities. Having dinner with a friend and ex-coworker from our Professional Services group the other night he expressed the same change in sentiment, adding, “when I was 22 at a much larger consulting firm, I abused [long road trips].” Exploration on the companies dime was just a much more interesting prospect before we built nests for ourselves at home with house, families, and friends.
I’m not complaining (about anything beyond this extendedness of this trip), but its an interesting lesson learned. Time to write a little bit about the highlights now!
