I’m back from a 3 week trip to the US and the Bahamas, and with all the stuff we managed to cram into the trip, it feels like we’ve been gone for 3 months. No kidding. One reason is probably, is that we had 4 distinctly different sections of the trip. They were:
1: 2 days in Manhattan.
2 days is about as much Manhattan as I can take in one go, and after that we were all New York’ed out. We walked all over midtown, saw two Broadway shows, found a great cheap Sushi place of Bleecker and happened by chance to be on Times Square as they were announcing Michael Jacksons innocence. As for the Broadway shows: Slava’s Snow Show is a wonderful, poetic, funny, touching clown show with some great special effects in a theatre just off Union Sqaure. See it if you get a chance!
2: The Bahamas
We flew down on JetBlue for only 99$ a person. Amazing! I attended Roosevelt Finlaysons conference on Festival in the workplace, and Patricia lazed by the pool (a divison of labour that suits us perfectly). The conference rocked and I met some very interesting people there, including Peter Block, the author of two of my favourite books: The answer to how is yes and Freedom and accountability at work.
3: Washington DC
Visiting a city is so much nicer, when you know somebody there, and I have the great fortune of having a friend in DC. Traci Fenton lives in a wonderful house on 14th street a few miles outside central DC, and let us stay in the guest room for as long as we wanted. Traci is putting together a conference on democratic organizations in october at which I will speak, and seeing her plans for the event I just know it will be great. We also went tubing on a lake in Manassas and did DC as tourists.
4: Touring
I want you to imagine a Roller Coaster that goes like this: You accelerate from 0 to a 190 Kph horizontally in 4 seconds. You go 130 meters straight up. You go over the top and then go 130 meters straight down. The you break, the entire ride having lasted 22 seconds. That’s Top Thrill Dragster, and we did it. 3 times. It rawks! For the last week we rented a car which turned out to be a Ford Mustang – niiiiice. We started by driving down to Williamsburg and seeing Busch Gardens there – which was OK. Then we drove to Cedar Point in Ohio and that seriously rocks. They have some of the tallest and fastest roller coasters on earth, including Top Thrill Dragster. All I can say is, that the extra wait to sit in the front row is totally worth it. We also drove around Pennsylvania and New Jersey for a couple of days, and I startled the people in a small bookstore in Andover NJ by buying 23 business books.
You can see the best pictures from the trip here.
It’s great to be getting back into gear in Copenhagen and enjoying the quiet summertime in the Happy at work project, before we hit what I just know will be a very busy and exciting autumn.
Just to make it more exciting, we’re planning an international conference/forum on happiness at work in september – more news will follow very soon.