Monday, June 27, 2005
Finally Home...

Ah.... I made it home. Finally! Time to get some sleep... :-)

The last month and a half was quite intense. Here's a quick recap of the itinerary:

1. Las Vegas (tour guide for relatives)
2. Los Angeles (speaking at a the Southern California Tech Summit conference)
3. Las Vegas again (speaking at the MEDC 2005 conference)
4. Austria (might as well go home since I have to go to Europe anyway... and do some business while we are there).
5. Amsterdam (speaking at the SDC 2005 conference)
6. Austria (a bit more business)
7. Houston (spending 3 days in the office... otherwise people think I dropped dead...)
8. Las Vegas (speaking at the Advisor DevCon conference)
9. Houston (for less than 12 hours... had some quick business meetings to attend)
10. New York City (speaking at the CircMan Show and conference)
11. Montreal (speaking at the DevTeach conference)
12. Finally, back to Houston

And all of this in just over 5 weeks. And I even cancelled my trip to TechEd in Orlando at the last minute (this is what gave me my 3 days in the office). I almost regret that in a way. After all, there is this awesome Sushi restaurant I known there (Amura). And I am not even sure I will get to Orlando again this year. Oh well. I'll get over it. ;-)

All these trips were fun, but to be honest, I was ready to get back. People often think that travel is just fun. This is not true. It is fun to be at different places, but it is not fun to spend hour after hour in air planes. It also isn't so much fun to go to all these exciting places and then not have time to do anything but business. I always try to set aside a little bit of time for myself, but more often than not, a nice dinner is all I have time for, and often, that nice dinner is just room service. (The answer to "How was Vegas?" would be something like "the Club Sandwiches there are just a little dryer than in New York"). Especially when the schedule is this busy, I am really looking forward to coming home. Working in the office almost seems like a vacation then.

What is next? I am not sure to be honest. Looks like I will have a month in the office. A trip to Seattle perhaps within the next 4 weeks. Looks like Oregon will be mixed in there as well. Perhaps we could even break away for a long weekend to go on a real vacation (haven't done that in a long time...). But overall, not that much is happening in July. Except maybe a trip to Europe. We'll see...