Travel sickness.

My very first blog posting from an airport departure lounge! I’m sitting in Brisbane airport at 3:01 on Friday, waiting for my flight back to Melbourne. I wonder how much I can type before we have to board in 29 minutes? Regardless of how little I type, it’ll be more than I’ve posted for the last few weeks, so it’s worth pressing on.

I’m heading home from a third week of working out of Queensland. It’s been quite a challenging/stressful few weeks actually, involving week-on/week-off stints supporting our company's new project just out of Brisbane. Those travel arrangements are due to continue at least until mid-May, so I have another three weeks in Brisbane at the very least. I'm sure that for many people the idea of business travel has some level of excitement or even glamour attached to it (or maybe some just enjoy getting out of the house for a while?), but that's not how it feels to me. Perhaps it's another one of those situations where the "ideal" of something doesn't sit well with the reality: all I know is that as soon as I check in I can't wait to get home. I'm not actually "sick" of travel - so the title of this post is misleading - but it'd be infinitely nicer to be sitting at home with the girls. I did have this beautiful picture of Jessica with me - on the desk in my hotel - so that made things a lot more bearable:


Today I was supposed to be on hand as a presenter for 4 tour groups, and the schedule of the tours was to have meant I would be getting home at about 11:30 tonight. Surprisingly, but thankfully, the last two tours were cancelled at the last minute, so I’ve rushed to the airport and been able to grab a flight that gets in 4 hours earlier. After getting up at 3:30 each day this week, I’ll be very glad to get home and get some rest. It's actually a funny/distressing story about how I came to be on this project, and why I'm travelling so much, but I might leave that for fear that it'll degenerate into another mopey, whine-y work story. We don't need another one of those on this blog.

Now, to quickly change the subject before I have to go... For a bit of fun, Mel & I both entered a few photos in a local agricultural show recently. Mel went really well, and in fact one two Third Prizes and a First Prize! I'm not going to post her entries here, as I'm sure it's more appropriate for her to post those on her own blog . It hasn't been updated this year (she's been very busy, especially with an AWOL husband!), but you'd have to think that introducing her prize-winning entries would be a great way to kick things off again...

Anyway, that's enough for me - must fly (no pun intended - although if that were true I probably would have deleted the word and replaced it with something else). On some level the pun must have been intended.

Matt