I was in Barcelona last week for The BIG IF # 2 (which was a hell of a fine improv festival, with great shows, people, workshops and general times, from beginning until end).
When I was walking through Schiphol yesterday afternoon, I realized that I would quite soon be on my way back through that airport, as I’m flying to London this afternoon.
Then Thursday I’m heading back to the airport to fly to Johannesburg, where I will meet Chiara, and hopefully some lions, elephants and penguins.
I love traveling. Well, more accurately, I love being in new cities and countries, which is easy enough to do when you choose your destination. But when you’re traveling for work, it can be challenging to maintain that positive attitude.
Since airports and travel have been on my mind, and under my feet recently, I wrote a little piece about air travel for A&J Magazine.
Travel and the airport
The business and pleasure of departures and arrivals
When my occasions for business travel were rare I found my workday routine going from comfortable to tiresome to aggravating, in short order. And once that happened, the surest remedy was to take a trip. 
Fortunately, duty would often then call, and summon me to another locale. Sure, it meant being in a meeting room most of the day, but that meeting room – and me! – would be in another city. It might be exotic, like Istanbul, warm like Barcelona, or grey like Brussels. But it was somewhere different. I’ve spent a working holiday in a Greek resort, a meal-centric day and evening in Milan, and an afternoon that felt like a week in an anonymous Dutch town.
In a best worst-case scenario I was recently on a job in Istanbul, and hardly left the hotel in two days. But in this particular instance, the accommodations were the palatial hotel that marked the beginning (or the end, depending on the direction you were traveling) of the Orient Express. The restored elegance of that spot compares favourably with my experiences at various prosaic airport lodgings, all aspiring to be ‘non-descript’.
Read the rest at A&J
