Apr 4
I had been in the UK since last Monday. This week begins a crazy period of work travel. If anyone has a potion for preventing illness after extended trips, then please share.
I beleive they call it the ‘Let Down Effect,’ which after extended periods of stress or travel or both, elevated hormone levels drop quickly, resulting in a ‘crash’ of the immune system.
Please click for moreThe United States has been blanketed this weekend in some of the worst winter weather it has seen for many years.
More than half of the population across 37 states have been affected and almost a million homes are without power. 60cm of snow fell overnight in parts of the north-east. In southern parts of the country warmer weather has brought ice storms and tornadoes.
Please click for more🔝5️⃣. Next and last up in my annual listing of Top Fives is Restaurants. I tell people that when I am travelling with work I’m either eating in Michelin starred restaurants, or sitting at an airport gate munching my way through a packet of crisps and overdosing on Haribo.
I did have some great meals last year, and occasionally I took the family! Here are my 2025 Top Five Favourite Restaurants 🍕
Please click for moreA little chilly here this New Year’s Eve morning in Sarasota. It might be a pyjama day, especially as our daughter has a touch of the flu so any plans, as minimal as they were, will have to be shelved.
I’ve never been a fan of ‘amateur night’ as I used to call it back in the day, so cooking and popping open a nice bottle of red later will be good enough for me.
Please click for moreBillie Eilish did 3 cities this week. Pah, I put two fingers up at that kind of sluggish convention. Me, mind you will have a week of a true rock ‘n roll tour.
Miami, Sarasota, Las Vegas, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Napa Valley. 7 cities, 7 days. The life of a rock star travelling salesman.
I used always write about my travelling whatever the reason or how insignificant the locale.
These days I travel so much with work that I rarely get time to write about them or frankly the places don’t muster a lot of creative thought.
Please click for moreNo, not a new rumoured signing but the ruthless villain and father of Luke Skywalker, of course.
I met Darth last night, he’s quite frightening in person, as I was lucky to be part of a group that was given a behind the scenes close up look of the Star Wars: The Rise of the Resistance ride at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World in Orlando.
Please click for moreThis week coming is the 6th consecutive week I have travelled with work. It has been quite the shift and other than never knowing what day it is or which city I’m waking up in, I could also do with a couple of really good nights sleep.
The good news is that tomorrow I will wake up at Gatwick Airport after an overnight flight from Tampa.
Please click for moreI am lucky to currently be in Colorado with the beautiful backdrop of the Rockies and rarefied mountain air for company this week.
The sky is a blueish violet and the sun is warm, and I probably didn’t need half of the layers I squeezed into my carry on.
Please click for moreI wrote my first New Year’s Eve ‘message’ in 2004, and have done so for each of the 20 years since. It’s makes me immensely proud, and old, that I have kept these pages alive for all of that time.
One of my New Year’s resolutions, normally futile, is to convert at least the first six years into a book. We’ll see.
Please click for moreI am in Bermuda this week. A catalogue of meetings interspersed by Christmas drinks, or the other way around, I’m not sure.
The Bermuda weather is about 10 degrees warmer here than it is in Sarasota, but still as humid as ever.
Please click for moreI arrived in London this morning flying overnight from Tampa. A noisy, rattly and bumpy flight meant I got little sleep but I was able to check into my hotel at 9am, which although I felt like crap, there was something to be said for lying in bed all morning with just the TV for company. I never do stuff like that.
Please click for moreBack to Bermuda today for the first time since June, which doesn’t sound very long but is the longest I have been off the island since 2008.
Hurricane threat’s aside, this is one of the best times of the year to be on the island. Humidity has dropped, the temperatures are just about perfect and it reminds me of evening’s on boats or sat in the garden drinking dark ‘n stormy’s.
Please click for moreIt must be about 20 years since I was last in Zürich, and I only know that because I had never done a Travelogue previously. Before then when I worked in London I was a frequent visitor.
I had forgotten how beautiful this city is, sat on two rivers and a lake with the Alps looming large in the background.
Read moreI am leaving Munich today feeling a little fragile after a night at the Oktoberfest.
My one and only visit was over two decades ago, and from memory hardly recognizable from back then.
Please click for moreI am flying to London tonight for an extended work trip that also takes in Zurich and Munich.
It’s my first time home since Christmas, so I am long overdue, and will spend the rest of the week in the City. No time for a soirée up to Cambridge unfortunately.
Please click for more20 Years I have been writing this Blog, and to celebrate my endurance I am selecting 20 Players and 20 Places, in no particular order, that I hold dear.
No.7 in Places is The City of London.
Please click for moreAnother Place on my list to extol my 20 Years of writing this Blog.
In no particular order, but each one memorable. No. 6 is Napa Valley in California.
Please click for moreIn life you come across people that lead and inspire, are selfless in everything they do, and despite operating in a highly pressured environment having to make tough decisions, no one ever has a bad word to say about you.
My boss was that person.
Please click for moreNo, not the new Michael Appleton chant, but I’m in Orlando this week so I refer to that other well known cartoon character Michael Mouse.
Orlando is a two-hour drive from Sarasota and I’m going to leave shortly for my companies annual Symposium and a whirlwind of non-stop half hour meetings, break-out sessions, key note speakers, panel discussions, lots of coffee, buffet lunches, dull dinners and late, late night’s in the bar.
Please click for moreAt the top of this blog 🔝 are eight Pages links. I don’t know if you’ve ever read them before but they are chapters of my life and I have just penned the latest one, Sarasota. It’s up top but it is also here:
Please click for moreTo wrap up what was an epic week of travelling, I am now in Miami with the family and friends celebrating a 50th birthday.
Flying back from Las Vegas Sunday night was tough, this body of mine is hurting after 10 days of travelling in California and then onto Las Vegas for the Formula 1 on Thursday. It was a week of epic proportions but one for the memory bank.
Please click for moreI am in Las Vegas for the inaugural Formula 1 race, which has garnered mixed reviews from locals and drivers alike, but it has consumed Vegas this weekend and is expected to bring in around $1.7 billion of additional revenues to the city that doesn’t sleep.
At last night’s qualifying there were some empty seats around us in the East Harmon Zone grandstand opposite the new permanent paddock, but the noise and octane levels were high.
Please click for moreA spell of quick work trips was the warm up for a much longer one. I am in San Francisco, California after travelling here yesterday. I am due downstairs in a few minutes to jump on a bus for what has been flimsily described as a team bonding day of wine tasting in Napa Valley. One of my happy places so the team building should be effortless.
Please click for moreThis new job of mine was always going to be an adjustment and one of those adjustments was the amount of travel I was going to have to do, particularly the short bursts of trip kind.
I have already spent a couple of late Friday’s nights at airports waiting to get home, which is not particularly fun, and a couple of Sunday’s have been spent travelling in readiness for an early Monday kick off.
Please click for moreThere’s a saying that after you leave somewhere you can go back too soon.
7 weeks after leaving the island of Bermuda I was back this week and it probably was a little soon.
Please click for moreJust over 15 years ago we moved from Chicago, the city of big shoulders to this beautiful if peculiar tiny island of Bermuda, but the time has now come to leave.
Bermuda has been good to us so we leave with a heavy heart staying far longer than we ever expected to. Bermuda is a wonderful place to live and bring up a young family, even our daughter was born here, but for numerous reasons in no particular order – school, a new work challenge, and as a family we were ready for something different, we have made a long thought and drawn-out decision to move.
Please click for moreHave you heard about this? Apparently TikTokers are championing the doing the ‘bare minimum Mondays.’ To do no more than is necessary. I love the youth of today. What they lose in passion and get up and go, they gain in ingenuity.
So, I took them up on the behavioural self-care, can’t be bothered trend and booked yesterday off.
Please click for moreAfter almost a week in the freezing temperatures of Colorado, I am now in the winter warmth of Florida.
Beaver Creek was as sensational as ever and the snow was ‘epic,’ which was how the guides were describing the huge amounts of snow that fell in the last week of January. It was still falling as I left causing a few now-normal flight delays. It was a good time all around and lovely to spend some quality time with people I hadn’t seen for three years.
Please click for moreI woke up this morning in Denver, Colorado.. as you do.
Flew here yesterday afternoon via New York, and arrived at the hotel at 2am. It was quite the hike. Snow lightly fell as we checked in and the photo is from my hotel room window just now.
Please click for moreAs I sit here drinking coffee at my kitchen counter in Sarasota tired from overdoing it on New Year’s Eve Eve, I am pretty pleased to put 2022 in the books.
Normality returned to life as we knew it in 2022 after two pandemic impacted years allowing us to remember again how to do the simple things we took for granted.
I often had to remind those around me, and myself that in times of hassle and intensity, that it was these moments that we’d missed. I love being busy and slightly living on the edge of unorganized and spontaneous, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Please click for moreSan Francisco’s streets were more like how I remember them last week when I was huffing and puffing up and down those towering hills.
I was staying at the top of Nob Hill, one of the seven famous hills in the city, although the list of the city’s hills is nearer to 50.
Please click for moreI’m in Sarasota, Florida for a few days, the first time I have been inside our house since Hurricane Ian. Happy to report it is still standing!
On Saturday, not long after the end of the Addicks’ FA Cup game, I fly to Las Vegas for what my daughter charmingly calls a ‘work vacation.’
Please click for moreIf you read my Puerto Rico Travelogue post from last week I wrote that we were told that a Cat 1 Hurricane hitting the island would mean that the fractured power grid would not survive.
Well, over the weekend Hurricane Fiona battered parts of Puerto Rico’s south and central mountain regions with more than 20 inches of rain and Cat 1 hurricane winds of 70-80 mph winds. The southern town of Ponce measured a gust of 103 mph. Landslides broke out in mountainous regions as waterways breached their banks. In the south-west the Guanajibo River crested at over 29ft washing a bridge away.
Please click for moreI spent the last few days in New York, which has slowly come back to life with sidewalks and streets busier.
Downtown by the World Trade Center in an evening fog the city was as evocative as ever, and as I always do I walked past the two vast 9/11 memorial reflecting pools where water is sucked 30 feet into gigantic square basins on the site of the original twin towers
Please click for moreI fly to Florida tomorrow for a few days mostly to check in on the house in Sarasota. See what the latest round of excuses are from the variety of contractors and artisans. No doubt our furniture is being sourced from Moscow.
Please click for moreSo bored of Covid. It has had it’s fun and games, killed loved ones, turned upside down daily life and prevented us from seeing the people and things that make us happy. Please just do one. Of all the hopes and aspirations for 2022 I want Covid to become no more than a nuisance factor and it no longer gets to run roughshod over our lives.
Please click for moreBack home indoors after almost a month away in the United States. The dog was ignoring me, but we rekindled a little on our morning walk earlier.
It was pretty restorative being away from this small isle for the past 4 weeks, travelling East Coast to West, and back again. When I left at the beginning of December Covid was in the rear view mirror and now it is back in the front seat. California and Florida have a complete different mindset when it comes to the pandemic, and one could easily see that after spending time in both States.
Please click for moreAt home in Sarasota, Florida this evening after a whirlwind and exhausting eleven day work trip, or as my daughter calls them work vacation’s.
A Five night kick-off in Las Vegas is not to be recommended, although the time there was more dominated (other than work) by sports more-so than gambling. I actually didn’t even get to sit at a table to lose any money. One reason I wasn’t that bothered was due to mandatory mask wearing at all times within the casinos.
Please click for moreWaking up very early in Las Vegas is more precise this morning. My body clock and my eyes are not in tally at all.
I was 14 hours late arriving into Las Vegas yesterday after the plane was hit by lightning on it’s journey into New York’s JFK, thus meaning an unexpected and irritating stopover at this funky hotel at the airport.
Please click for more20 years ago. It seems implausible. What happened that day was almost implausible.
Everyone remembers where they were when they first heard about a Boeing 767 loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel fly high into New York’s World Trade Center north tower at 8.45am on September 11th, 2001.
Please click for moreThe first day of Bermuda’s summer is May 24th. Traditionally, well for about 110 years, it was always on May 24th…. I know, weird.
Yet last year Bermuda Day was moved by the government in their wisdom to the last Friday of the month which is a pain in the harris for me as work is chaotic and the last Friday of the month is and will always likely be stupid busy.
Please click for moreThe year of all years crawls to a welcome end tonight. Sadly nothing will be much different when the sun rises tomorrow, and it is probably going to get worse before it gets better. Still, a new year brings new dreams and hopes of better times ahead.
We have a Chinese guy in our office, and after he returned to Bermuda from being back in China at the beginning of January he was made to stay at home. When he did come back to the office he wore a mask. It was odd to see him walk around with a mask and no one quite knew how to act around him.
Fast forward 12 months and the entire world has been heavily inflicted by Covid-19. This silent terror of a virus has literally changed the world we live in, a film set only previously in the minds of story tellers.
‘Merica! Land of the free…. home of division. 🇺🇸
It might only be a national election, but the U.S. election has a far reaching impact on the world, and the U.K. in particular with Brexit around the corner of what has been the longest road ever laid.
My team which has some American denizen has decided to get out on the water today leaving the politics on the shore. We will be joined by others and we will drink wine, eat pizza and possibly dip ourselves into the ocean, although the current water temperature of 26 degrees maybe too chilly for some, including me who’s blood has thinned even more after being island-locked for the last 9 months.
Day 140 working from home (not that I’m counting 😩).
Like most others I’d imagine, I left the office on that Monday in March pretty unprepared for a long working stint at home, I walked out of the office re-assuring the team that I’d see them soon and was armed with my trusted laptop and notepad.
I was temporarily perched on the couch those first two weeks with laptop on lap, but with the TV news on a loop it became apparent how deep and bad the pandemic was.
A national holiday in Bermuda today and tomorrow, as the island celebrate’s Cup Match, a cricket game between sides from the two ends of the island battling it out over two days to win de Cup.
For 118 years this battle of wits has occurred at this time of the year, never stopping for war or strife, but sadly like all the world’s major sporting events Bermuda Cup Match 2020 was cancelled.
A Bermuda national holiday today. Once the Queen’s Birthday holiday, in recent times the island took to celebrating local historical figures, and renamed it National Heroes Day. Although from what I can make out very few heroes have ever been named, which seems very strange to me. I have long given up by being bewildered by Bermuda’s idiosyncrasies though.
In recent years this weekend became the focal point of a growing Carnival scene, attempting to emulate those in other Caribbean countries. Bermuda’s efforts have been rewarded as numbers have grown consistently helped by more and more tourists. From memory the number of visitors for last last year’s carnival weekend topped 1,500.
What an extraordinary week, unprecedented since the war years, or possibly 9/11 and 7/7, in my lifetime. The week moved quickly didn’t it. The Coronavirus moving across the world like a tidal wave, changing the way we live our lives almost instantly.
Then we just shake our heads at the farcical but possibly ruinous saga going on at Charlton. From whispers to chaos to realization in the space of a week.
The world’s markets crashed taking savings and pensions with them. Then this week I had my own personal work development, which will be transformational and unsettling at the same time.
Brexit…. All is forgiven.
Colorado bound and I will be as high as 5,500 feet tonight in the arty district of downtown Denver. Sunday dinner with a client, then a little bit of a lie in before a couple hours drive up the Rocky Mountains to Beaver Creek, which sits at 11,000 feet to embark on a week of skiing work.
It’s hard to even fathom that 20 years ago today we were at work unsure as to whether the computers would even come back on after we came back from the new Millennia celebration. Millennials can look up that near calamity here.
2019 has flown by, work has been the busiest I have known it since I’ve been in Bermuda, the results have been bloody good though, but absolutely exhausting and it didn’t surprise me to just be told I have almost 4 weeks holiday left for the year.
My predilection for travelling has thus taken a backward seat this year, for which I’m very disappointed with myself. Good news though is that after years of attempting to renovate a house in Sarasota, Florida, which has veered from the tortuous to the exorbitant, it may finally become liveable so that is an exciting development and will be a home from home.
I woke up far too early in Las Vegas this morning (I did plan to be here) as body clock and eyes were completely out of sync. After a little bit of tossing and turning, my brain kept replaying Matt Smith’s goal, which wasn’t good for the soul, so I went for a walk. Las Vegas in the early hours is a sight to behold I can tell you. Give’s south Bermondsey a run for its money.
I’m out here on a work trip, today was a chill day, but from this evening onwards we have a very busy schedule as we venture all over south and north California. Sleep will be a distant ambition by the time I return home from San Francisco next Saturday.
A much needed day off tomorrow. Work has been intense and ceaseless all year and not having a proper holiday has bitten me on my waning arse. On Monday Bermuda closes for one of it’s more fanciful national holidays, but a very worthwhile one as it chooses to honour the Portuguese on the island celebrating 170 years of Portuguese culture.
The timing is, in typical Bermuda government fashion, a little random, but the Portuguese have given a lot to this little island, including making regular naval visits in the 1500’s before it was settled by the English in 1612.
I forgot how beautiful Sedona is. The 23-mile drive along Highway 89A from Flagstaff around and down the Oak Creek Canyon dropping a couple of thousand feet into Sedona rivals many of the best drives in the United States.
Towering trees line the beds of the Canyon’s mountainsides, whose natural springs are said to have healing powers. There are plenty of stop-off’s to get closer to the beautiful rock formations, and Midgely Bridge, is one. The steel bridge that arches gracefully over the canyon is a proper Kodak moment, or a less fussy iPhone moment if you will.
Mr popular at home this morning as I crashed and banged out of the house at dusk lugging a suitcase for a work trip. I leave behind a family and an island that is bracing it for its first major hurricane in three years.
Hurricane Humberto is moving east-northeast at 7mph and then is due to take a sharp right turn as it finds Bermuda’s warm waters and will roll very close to us as a Cat 2 storm on late Wednesday night.
Leaving early this morning for my companies annual Symposium in Orlando, which is nowhere near as much fun as it used to be when it was in South Beach, Miami. But, with only Mickey as a distraction, it’s also nowhere near as alcohol infused.
It is however a whirlwind of non-stop half hour meetings, break-out sessions, key note speakers, panel discussions, one of which I’m presenting and moderating and early starts and late finishes.
After a journey that took 19 hours I made it to the city of Denver late last night. The steps of the State Capitol building are a mile above sea level giving the town its nickname.
The journey from Bermuda is already a hike, and then I got stuck at Miami airport as our plane was taken out of service due to mechanical reasons and we had to wait for another one, give the crew a break etc, and missed a connection in Dallas, blah blah..
It’s late morning here in Orlando and ahead of a big night, which is all relative these days, I find myself yawning like a lion. Life would not be the same unless I wasn’t tired, although one horrible habit I’ve picked up as I’ve reached half a century is that of waking up in the middle of night, and not always to pee. Then the old noggin bursts into life and that’s that.
We celebrated our 10th year in Bermuda this past summer, which scares me more than anything, but there are still plenty of things to keep us here. Some more appreciated than others. Possibly the realization of how idyllic and halcyon this island is only hits home when I’m sat watching the world news which follows on from our own unremarkable village-type chronicles and see what kind of crazy shit happens elsewhere in the world.
63 years ago Walt Disney had a vision. After mastering the animated movie, Disney wanted to bring the ultimate family theme parks to America. He bought a 160-acre site in Anaheim, California and after just a year of construction Disneyland’s grand opening, featuring twenty attractions, was televised live on ABC and watched by 70 million viewers, whilst 28,000 people, most of which managed to gate crash, were in the park.
Today a much larger Disneyland Park gets around 100,000 daily visitors, and I was one of them earlier this week, but was very fortunate to do what 100,000 people are unable to, and got a behind the scenes ticket.
A couple of days in the crazy place that is Las Vegas. I was last here just 6 weeks ago, and other than the temperature literally being half of what it was in August, nothing much else has changed.
I’m up early mostly due to the time difference but also because of the throb of the bass outside my hotel window as the Sunday night revellers party until the time when most normal people are on their commute to work.
Which is what I’m doing today, but yesterday was the laziest of days, which was a rare weekend treat, although it took a fair while to shake a hangover collected after a larger than anticipated Saturday night.
I’m back in Chicago this week with work, although as I’m in Chicago I intend to catch up with a few people and places as well.
I will be downtown except for a work client trip out to Blue Island one afternoon, which is not an island at all, and from the pictures it doesn’t look very blue. Described here as “gritty” and “a must-see for anyone serious about railroading.” It has Addick written all over it.
Travelling to one of my favourite places on the planet this afternoon. Chicago. A place I truly miss everyday, well apart from those -17 celsius kind of days..
When I first planned this trip back home I also fully anticipated driving up to Shrewsbury tomorrow. At that time Lee Bowyer had breathed life back into all of us, I hadn’t been to the New Meadow (or Gay Meadow come to think of it) and, well, what else was I to do on a Tuesday? I looked at hotels to stay in, and I would have driven to Gatwick Wednesday.
Anyway, fortunately I guess, I now have to be in the office on Wednesday so need to fly back tomorrow and instead, and not for the first time recently, I will be on a plane for the whole duration of the game.
Sarasota, Florida
