It’s hard to stay focused on any one thing when you’re planning to walk out the door with everything you need for a two-week business trip. I tend to suddenly remember something like my international phone charger, so I walk away from my work files to get it. Soon, I have “do not forget” piles of stuff all over the house. I can’t afford to take all the stuff I want on this trip, though, because the trip looks something like this: KC -> Atlanta -> Amsterdam -> Cologne -> Mouscron (Belgium) -> Brussels -> Aachen (Germany) -> Zurich -> Cologne -> home. In addition to the international flights, there’s also boarding trains almost every day and constant checking in and out of hotels. Even a roller bag will prove cumbersome, so I’m stripping down to what can be carried in a medium size backpack. In addition to the slacks I’ll wear on the plane, I’m packing one more pair. Two dress shirts. One tie. No extra shoes, a couple sweaters, a minimum of socks and boxers, and three paperbacks. The upside of packing for mobility is that no one will see me twice, so I’ll only bore myself with my redundant wardrobe. Other than that, I’ll use the hotel laundry services and buy any clothes items I discover I need over there.
This will be a solitary trip, with long periods of being on the move peppered with frequent meetings involving no one I’ve met before. So you stay busy, but not preoccupied. It’s easy to get so caught up in reviewing an upcoming presentation while fretting about making the next train change that you forget to stop all the spinning cogs in your head and simply look out the window – ‘Hey, that’s a castle flittering behind the denseness of the Black Forest out there!’ Actually, I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding those kinds of regrets, but there is a road weariness that settles in with this kind of travel, no matter how fantastic the places are that you find yourself.
There’s no time to really tour a city, but I find enough satisfaction in finishing my work day, checking into the hotel and picking out one place I’d like to see, however obscure and preferably walking distance away. I soak in the local color along the way, spend thirty minutes or so completely involved in my destination, and top it off with a simple dinner at a small neighborhood restaurant with my book, or better yet, some conversation with a local. The key is to not walk out of the hotel, say the hell with it, and spend the evening in a barstool at the Irish pub across from the hotel. That said, I enjoy the anonymity of this kind of travel, free for a time from the labels I or others have placed upon me at home, and see if new acquaintances will find me irresistibly charming or just another moron who needs to move on to his next port of call. We’ll soon see. Anyway, plenty of European photos to come.
berowne.com 