An update from up here (36,000 ft over the USA)

There’s nothing like a 5 and half flight from Toronto to San Francisco to allow one to catch up on the odd blog post (and I suspect this may be an odd blog post).

I am heading home from the longest trip I’ve done in a very long time. I’m tired, homesick and have too much going on in the inside-of-the-head department.

The trip was primarily to attend the International Association of Commercial Administrators (IACA) conference in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. I travelled to the US a week in advance of the IACA event in order to hold some meetings in Washington DC. The week after the conference has been spent in Toronto with my company’s Canadian operation.

Any one who (foolishly) follows my random blogs or tweets will know I am no stranger to travel. There was something different about this trip however. I have been out of sorts in this last week and am trying to figure out why. It’s more than just that I’ve been away for 19 days…

The conference itself was great and the venue beautiful. I am sure I bored colleagues to tears with my insatiable appetite for the history of the region. Williamsburg itself is fascinating and very well done. It was wonderful to catch up with so many IACA friends at the event. I first attended an IACA in Sante Fe, New Mexico in 2000. So many of the attendees have become friends over the years and the subsequent conferences. Many are on Facebook and so we keep in contact throughout the year which enables a wonderfully warm greeting at our annual ‘real’ meetings.

The meetings in DC and Toronto were positive and useful (I hope) to the future of Foster Moore.

The trip involved staying in four hotels all of which were pleasant, my favourite always being the Cambridge Suites. I’ll write a piece about that stay separately I suspect.

None of these things explain my ‘funk’ of the last few days. I’ve done these stays so many times before.

I think the issue (and this is probably not rocket science) is the absence of my family. I miss them to bits. We’ve been in constant contact with numerous Skype sessions, SMS messages and phone calls as always. While these forms of contact are useful and affordable and allow me to keep in touch with the news of the day, they are devoid of touch.

I am longing to hold my girls.

Pure and simple human touch.

Balance will be restored to the universe soon…