What I Use: Berlin 2024 (Premium)

Like many, my life is split between the pre- and post-pandemic years, and that terrible year that everything changed forever. Among the changes is how we spend our time outside the United States. In the pre-pandemic years, my wife and I spent at least a month each year in Europe, but in the post-pandemic years, we spend some number of months in Mexico City instead.

What this "means" is debatable, but practically speaking, we've adapted to this new life and we're no longer familiar with what it means to travel to Europe from the U.S. It feels exotic and strange, unknown. And yet familiar too. We had visited Europe many dozens of times, after all, often several times each year. But things are different now.

Since 2020, we've left the country dozens of times. In all but one instance--a delayed 30th anniversary trip to Paris, my favorite city, in October 2021--every international flight we've taken has been to Mexico City. And we've gotten used to it. The relatively short 4.5 hour-ish flights that occur during the day instead of overnight. Business class instead of economy. A one or two hour time change instead of five hours. And arriving in a state in which you're not exhausted and beat-up, and can hit the ground running.

This is great for all the obvious reasons. But we've gotten soft. The familiarity and sameness of our routine flights to Mexico City has sheltered us from the often-harsh reality of international travel. Age doesn't help. As recently as 2019, the year before the pandemic, my wife and I jumped at the chance to spend roughly 24 hours in Barcelona so I could visit Mobile World Congress for the HoloLens 2 launch. (Tell me that doesn't feel like a million years ago.) I'm not sure if I could make that trip today. I am reasonably sure I'd say no, regardless. It just sounds so tiring. And I love Barcelona.

Tied to this, when the pandemic ended work travel as I knew it, I went through the standard stages of grief over time. Mary Jo and I would join colleagues on Zoom calls to catch up, and we'd reminisce about this life that seemed to be over, and the regular events at which we'd normally all catch up. Build. Ignite. Microsoft launch events. And more. Each in a fun destination. Or at least some destination. It felt normal. And then it was over. And then ... then, I wasn't sure I wanted it to come back. I dealt with not traveling. And then I kind of didn't want to travel. It felt like too much. Helping matters, it wasn't happening anyway. Infamously, Microsoft didn't restart its big shows in a normal way until this year.

That said, work travel is making a comeback, though it's been slow in my case. I've been to some smaller Microsoft events in New York. I went on a TWiT cruise to Alaska (granted, mostly non-work) in mid-2022. I've been to Ignite (November 2023) and then Build (May 2024). And now it seems like this thing is churning up again. I've been invited to two HP events in California, which I've...