Back in Michigan for a bit

Feels good to be home. I just finished back to back weeks of travel for work, both for big, high profile tradeshows for us. First was Las Vegas for the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. This is a huge meeting, with around 15,000 orthopedic surgeons and another 10,000 to 15,000 industry representatives in attendance. This was my second time in Las Vegas. My first trip was about 13 years ago and I got the stomach flu the second day there so most of my trip was spent in the hotel room. Unfortunately these tradeshows are super busy so I don't get much time to look around, but just being there really made me want to come back for a vacation with Jackie. Neither of us are gamblers, but there's just so much to do there and in the surrounding area.

I flew home from Vegas Saturday afternoon, had Sunday and Monday at home, then left for Washington DC on Tuesday for another meeting. We stayed in a new development south of DC right on the Potomac called National Harbor at the Gaylord National Resort. This is a massive hotel with a huge atrium in the middle, a big convention center, and a bunch of restaurants. We were supposed to be there until Sunday morning, but came up with a plan to get out early if everything went well.

For a while I thought that I might have screwed up our chances as I pissed off the union steward at the exhibit hall. Union rules vary all across the country, sometimes we are required to use union workers and sometimes we can do our own work to set up our exhibit. Well, apparently I didn't read the fine print right. We set up our entire booth ourselves, then the union steward stopped by to tell me I wasn't supposed to and needed to order laborers for the teardown at the end of the show. Okay, no problem, went over and ordered that. But we're in a hurry to get out of there so the show ends and we start taking our stuff apart. Again the union steward comes by and asks me what we're doing. Somehow they lost our order for labor and didn't send someone over. So now they're probably thinking I'm trying to steal their union jobs. All I want to do is get packed up fast so I can go home. They told us we had to stop working on our booth and let the laborers they were sending do all the work. The guys they sent were great though, hard workers and seemed to know what they were doing.

We ended up finishing up in about an hour, then headed to the airport and were able to get on a flight that night. Now I need to get my butt in gear and get back onto a regular exercise schedule. My activity has been a haphazard collection of short workouts over the past few weeks, whatever I had time to fit in. Its rainy out today, but the weather is starting to warm up and with daylight savings there will be time after work now to get outside.