During the third quarter, I traveled nowhere until the very last day of September when my wife and I traveled to Dallas for our niece's wedding. This wedding had been in the works for over a year, and we had been very much looking forward to it as it would be the first of my wife's siblings' children to get married. All three of my wife's siblings attended and even our daughter was able to make the trip from her home in Seattle.
While it was a short trip, it was action packed with a very nice rehearsal dinner on Friday night and a fabulous wedding Saturday night atop one of the most elegant high-rise hotels in Dallas.
It was really great to get a chance to visit with family at such a joyous occasion.
Less than two weeks later, I was off on what is becoming an annual SibSab in Monteat, NC. My two sisters drove over from northwest Arkansas and then the three of us drove up meeting our brother who had driven down from PA. As always, it was great for the four of us to get together in the location we vacationed at each summer growing up. I wrote a very detailed post about that trip previously, so you click here if you missed that one.
Interestingly, just a week later, I was flying back up to North Carolina, this time to the home of my sister- and brother-in-law to celebrate his 70th birthday. For me this again was one of those short trips flying up on Friday and then returning on Sunday. But the birthday celebration started early in the afternoon and went late into the night. It was once again great to visit with family and I even got a chance to catch up with an old friend and his wife who lived not far away that I had not seen in many years. He and I were able to share retirement stories as he, an airline pilot had recently retired also.
In November, I had two trips. The first was the week before Thanksgiving when my wife and I flew back out to Seattle for the second time to visit with our daughter and her family. As with our previous trip, it afforded our daughter and son-in-law the chance to spend the night out and we got our two grandsons all to ourselves. A great time was had by all. For this trip, I also published a previous post so you can click here if you missed that one.
The week after Thanksgiving, my very last trip of the year turned out to a bit of a walk down memory lane. I had started doing some consulting for my former company in September and one of the requests was for me to come and do some in-person training for the two topics I always teach on, Stability and Analytical Methods Validation. Having not traveled to New Jersey since 2019, it was interesting to see how the terminal I always flew into had been transformed to a Jersey shore scene with boardwalk walkways and picnic tables. I booked my stay at the same historic hotel we always stayed at back in the early 1990s when I along with many of my colleagues would fly to New Jersey on a corporate Lear jet. I even ate dinner the first night at the famous steak restaurant we frequented on those trips, this time all decked in holiday décor.
Over the next two days I had an absolute blast teaching in-person for the first time since 2019 (pre COVID) to the staff at that site. After three years of teaching virtually, I had forgotten how much I missed interacting with the participants in person. While there, I got the chance to reconnect with some former colleagues as well as meet many new and interesting staff. The training went extremely well, and it felt great getting such positive feedback from the participants.
In fact, they invited me back in the spring for some additional training and seeing the New York skyline in the distance from the airport on the morning of my flight home, I knew the next time I would need to add some additional time to visit the Big Apple.
So overall, I had twelve trips in 2022, almost twice as many as 2021 and a definite rebound from so few in 2020. Hopefully you were also able to get in some fun travel last year and will be able to this year as well.
So, cheers to another fun year of travel in 2023!
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