A day in Holland

I flew to Amsterdam last night to be in Holland for a meeting today. It’s always a bit of a pain to travel for just one day away, as you need almost as much stuff with you as you do for a week. I also miss two evening away from home in a week when the girls are staying with me. I took the last flight on Tuesday to Amsterdam and stayed at a hotel near the airport. The hotel was OK and had a good wireless connection, so I was able to check e-mails and Skype with Caro. We had a long chat about her feelings for her flat in Cologne and how this is affecting her at the moment. She’s giving up a lot of things with her planned move to Sweden, like her job, her flat and a part of her life, and I can understand this is a big thing for her. This will no doubt lead to more conversations like this over the coming months and it’s not so easy to know how I can help, as I’m the one staying in the same place. I hope I can be a good listener and support her during this period. If it was possible for me to move just now, perhaps things would be different… but we’ve agreed on this as a way forward for us and we will have to deal with both the bad and good sides of this solution together.
The business meeting went well in Holland and I’m on my way home now. At the airport I sit in the lounge updating my blog and checking e-mail again. How did people ever manage before wireless LAN’s and laptops! The flight at 20:15 to Stockholm will get me home by about 23:15 if I’m lucky.