Today I was scheduled to make a short flight from Vancouver to Nanaimo. It is early spring here on the southwest Pacific coast of Canada, which means blossoming trees, fresh spring flowers and, to everyone’s surprise, a blizzard in Nanaimo, which meant my flight was cancelled. So I high tailed it out to Horseshoe Bay and jumped n the new Coastal Rennaissance ferry and headed to Vancouver Island by slow boat. Revelling in my new found free time, and fresh from adding up the contents of my suitcase, I decided to crunch the numbers and see what my travel schedule has really been like. Here it is:
- Number of days from January 1 to March 31: 91
- Number of those nights I spent in my own bed: 28
- Days in which I did nothing at all related to work: 25
- Number of those days that were in Maui starting New Year’s Day:10
- Number of flight segments: 25
- Number of airlines travelled: 4
- Number of train rides from Vancouver to Seattle: 3
- Number of cars rented: 0
- Number of flights cancelled for snow: 3
- Days of work missed as a result: 1
- Temperature with windchill in Celsius that Regina experienced on that day: -56
- Number of flights taken from Vancouver to Toronto: 2
- Percentage of those flights on which the on board computer needed rebooting before we could leave: 100%
- Number of US Border crossings: 6
- Number of US Customs and Border Protection officers encountered: 10
- Number who wished me well, thanked me, welcomed me or said nice things: 2
- Number who admitted me to the United States without a single word exchanged between us: 1
- Number of clients: 14
- Trips in which I worked with three or more clients in person without going home: 3
- Trips during which my family came with me: 3
- Meals which I have cooked for my family: 3
- Weeks in a row I am taking off from work between June and September: 10
- Consecutive days I get to spend in my own bed starting Sunday: 15
That last stat: luxury.
The funnest moment, by a long way, was surprising my father on his 70th birthday. We flew to Ontario, drove with my mother through a raging blizzard for three hours, arrived at my parent’s house as my dad was going to sleep, and crept up the stairs singing “Happy Birthday.” The look on his face was beautiful, have asleep and full of love and delight. Nothing compares.
For years I have been using and extollng the virtue of wikis (and their cousin GoogleDocs) as collaborative tools. For some reason it seems hard for most people to take them up. Thanks to Euan I found this graphic at wikinomics, and it says it all to me. For best results, take it with this video. Now can we use wikis? Please?
Just a post for posterity’s sake, blogged from Vancouver. I haven’t quite made it home yet.
This has been the busiest two months in the history of my consultancy practice, travel wise. For the last month, I have been living out of a suitcase, with my schedule consisting of a week on the road and one or two days at home for four weeks in a row. My home has been an Eagle Creek Switchback Max 25 (which is an incredibly excellent bag, if I do say so myself), and it’s full of everything I need for my travelling facilitation and harvesting roadshow, including:
- Two pairs of “good” pants and a pair of jeans.
- Two “good” shirts and two t-shirts.
- Swim trunks/shorts, taekwondo pants and taekwondo shoes.
- Five pairs of socks
- Four 75g Higgins Brothers juggling balls
- A modified Generation tin whistle in D
- A box of Charters markers and some assorted Mr. Sketch pens
- 3 sets of Staetdler pens: 8 triplus fineliners, 20 triplus fineliners and 20 triplus colour
- Two Moleskines – a new one and an old one
- A copy of Stephen Karcher’s I Ching and my current read, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (which I bought…)
- A deck of playing cards
- My laptop, cellphone, Canon Powershot A720, Olympus DS-2 voice recorder, Sansa 2GB mp3 player and an assortment of cables, connectors and a webcam.
- A plastic Nalgene water bottle (soon to be replaced by metal)
- A steel travel mug from Bad Ass Coffee in Maui.
- A tiny single steel travel espresso cup that always elicits “ahhhhhh…cuuuuute” comments from Asian baristas at airport espresso bars (it’s a phenomenon…)
- Glasses, toiletries, tea bags, wallet, passport, a file folder with border documentation and some ball point pens.
The whole thing is pretty manageable, and contains everything I need to work, exercise, play and amuse myself on long flights. It all goes on my back when I am walking between the ferry and my home, which is a mile through forest and along rural roads, and it all rolls nicely along airport and hotel floors. I have literally been living out of this bag for a month, at home and on the road, (with the exception of the three days the bag was in Korea) only changing around the clothes when I get home, switching dirty for clean. All told, a tidy little set up, and a nice reminder of how little I actually need to work and live with.
The Westin Hotel in Atlanta, which lost windows in last week’s tornado.
A strange week indeed. I left home yesterday morning bound for Toronto and then on to Atlanta where I am doing some work with Public Radio Capital and Native Public Media, looking at how Native community radio stations make an impact. Yesterday I made it as far as Toronto, but a flight delay meant I was cutting my connection close, and I still had to apply for a work visa at US Customs and Border Protection. I arrived in secondary screening at 10 to eight, with an 830 flight pending. There was no one else in the room, save a distraught Hispanic woman who was being denied entry and a tired Chinese man, waiting for his visa too. I have applied for four of these TN visas and it’s not an onerous process. All three officers however remarked on my short time, and I patiently explained to them that my flight was delayed, I was doing my best and could they try and get me on the 830 flight to Atlanta.
But alas, US Customs and Border Patrol is not about customer service. It is very much about creating an environment that seeks to put you off your game, get you to tip your hand, spill the beans. Officers stay out of rapport, breaking eye contact should you try to engage, and in secondary screening, they move very slowly, laughing and talking loudly about clearly non-related stuff. It seems designed to put you on the defensive. They’re cool…what’s bugging you? So alas at 830, after sitting alone in the customs hall with five officers trading stories, an officer finally called me forward, asked a few questions and gave me my visa. By then the plane had gone and I was bound for a night in Toronto. There was no apology to be had. But I don’t complain – that is their job: to screen anyone entering the United States and ensure that no immigration laws are broken. That is how things are with Homeland Security. For me it’s just good practice in patience.
As for Air Canada, they were good enough to recognize their part in the timing delay and they nicely put me up at the Sheraton right at the airport. So props to them.
Luckily my connection was non-essential, and so I rebooked for this morning, and shot down here on a quick CRJ flight, arriving at noon, which was too early for this Shearton, so, stranded again, I set out around downtown Atlanta searching for life. It was long before I discovered that life, even on this lovely cool spring day, was all underground, in the Peachtree Center mall, where long lines of office workers were queued up at fast food outlets for lunch. I found some decent pad thai (Atlanta is a very multicultural city, despite your prejudices about what Georgia must be like) and settled into read the Globe and Mail. In the Life section I read this quote by the poet James Richardson, which sums up my week:
The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.
Sweet. And so with that, I headed back out into the downtown core and shot some photos of the buildings, and especially the Westin Hotel which lost a whole lot of windows in a tornado last week. Tomorrow I run a two hour world cafe on measuring the impact of Native community radio stations, then I hop an afternoon flight to Toronto and on to Vancouver so that I can arise bright and early Thursday for the first day of two with the Department of Fisheries and Ocieans. I finish that job on Friday at noon, debrief, hit a 5pm flight to Nanaimo and head up to Parksville to run a weekend retreat for the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Service until Sunday at noon. Then I’m home, and staying there for about two weeks. That will be the longest stint at home this year, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to play with my kids and tend our new garden.
If I didn’t have flow, and if I didn’t see travel and work like this as one long extended meditation, I don’t know how I’d survive it.
This week is Conversation Week.
I’ve known Vicki Robin for a few years now. She’s a lovely, lively and curious soul, not shy about standing up and taking responsibility for leading shift in the world. She developed the Conversation Cafe methodology, and conceived of Conversation Week in 2001.
Vicki was with us at the Art of Hosting on Whidbey Island in January, where she did something I’ve never seen before. She stepped out of her own methodology and facilitated an Open Space gathering. She was skeptical about Open Space, not having had great experiences in Open Space gatherings, and she is a developer of process, and in my experience, those who have devoted their lives to developing and polishing methodologies rarely step out of their cherieshed processes and try something new. Vicki held space beautifully for us and was incredibly generous with the group about her learning and observations. I have never seen a person so closely identified with one methodology step out and practice in another one. It was really very cool.
You can now hear for yourself some of these observations and learnings from Vicki’s many years of experience. She recently produced a short podcast on Conversation Week and the art of hosting, which is a lovely summation of the role of a host and ways that you can host everywhere. This is a great way to get into Conversation Week and contemplate a deeper practice of hosting.