It turns out that when I have a business trip to a place where my spouse has family, he thinks it’s a good idea to join me.  Hmmm.  After nearly 30 years of solo business travel, I have now had company on two trips in just over one year. Yes, I’m going to Scotland for a conference. And yes, it makes sense that he comes along and we spend some time visiting family when I’m not learning stuff.  Okay, fine – I’ll share.

Travel now is more “interesting” since the arrival of our newest “child” – Buddy the beagle mix joined us in late October and we’ve been adjusting ever since.  There needs to be an entire separate post on adopting a dog as empty nesters – this isn’t it.  But it does affect our ability to travel.  We now need to make sure that we arrange for space in the kennel in advance.  Luckily, he boards at the vet and seems to be quite happy about it so we feel a *little* less guilty about leaving him behind.

So now we are off to Edinburgh so that I can spend 4 days at the International Digital Curation Conference and then a few extra days visiting friends and family.  Frank gets to spend all the time visiting:  work for me, holiday for him.

Not only does travel require more planning now, we are also seriously risk averse when it comes to planning.  After the hellacious travel experience of last summer,  I no longer assume that 1.5 hours connecting time in Newark airport is sufficient.  So when faced with that option for this trip, I decided to go for the earlier flight out of KC which meant we had 7 hours in EWR.  Ugh.  Well, this gave us an opportunity to try out our new Priority Pass membership to airport lounges that we got with our newest Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card (because Sapphire out ranks Platinum apparently!).

href=”https://cannonchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/img_0702.jpg”>We landed from KCI just after 1pm and wandered from terminal C to terminal B where the Arts & Lounge was.  Our card got us in and we had a place to sit and munch and drink and do some work and talk to the kids on the phone and just chill. We worked through sandwiches (Frank), salad (me), several glasses of cava (both) before the noise level and boredom chased us back to C terminal.

So now we sit in the United Club lounge – aren’t we just the globetrotters! – where there is a bit more ambiance as well as wifi and alcohol.  And only 3 more hours til the plane leaves. {sigh}

Cross your fingers that this is an uneventful trip and the next post just raves about all my newly gained knowledge or complaints about the weather.