Last year was mental.
Back in December 2015, with about about 10 days’ notice, a colleague and I flew to Orlando on a Sunday lunchtime, ran a meeting Monday morning, and flew home Monday night.
That was just the start. In January I had a 36-hour round trip to Dubai—but as I left at the end of the work day and had a 2 AM return flight it turned into a 48-hour no-sleep marathon.
Then in February I was in Toronto for 3 or 4 days. I did manage to snatch a few minutes to see Richard, but had precious little time for anything else.
I think I had a bit of a break in March, but then in April I was off to Barcelona, with a random trip to Berlin somewhere around then, and then there were another couple of day trips (Nancy via Luxembourg and Freiburg via Basel), before our big meeting again in Barcelona in the middle of June.
This is all work travel. You get very little chance to do any sightseeing: airport, taxi, hotel, taxi, airport is the usual itinerary. Some people manage to squeeze in holiday at the end of these trips but I like to get back for Joshua, so I don’t see much of these places.
When we got back from our much-appreciated holiday in August, I thought the madness had stopped. There was a project kick-off in Berlin (one night in a Holiday Inn), but as far as I was concerned, that was essentially it for the year.
How wrong can you be?
A couple of days after our holiday, our major client asked us to run an extraordinary meeting for them… at the end of November. So from September to the end of November, I was on a work trip (abroad) about once every 8 or 9 days. There was Berlin, Berlin again, Berlin several times in fact, as well as New Orleans, Berlin again and then Vienna for the meeting itself.
No wonder I was knackered.
I’m hoping 2017 will be a little less frenetic, and will let me replace my passport—the biometric chip is broken and won’t let me through the automated gates. I do already have a Berlin overnighter in a couple of weeks though, and I haven’t read my work email in 2 weeks.
And look what happened last time I did that.
