April 13. Plans and Planes

Not too many things are as uncomfortable as Economy class on a red-eye flight. I probably got about 2 hours sleep. But I can’t complain. This Iberia flight was far superior than the flight I had last year. We had a little drama when one passenger felt faint and nearly keeled over and a bunch of people rushed to his aid. What would happen if one is flying over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and a passenger has a heart attack? No place to land! Apparently he was okay. Flying into Madrid over the mountains looked particularly beautiful this year. It never ceases to amaze me how a pilot can fly across the entire ocean and touch the plane down on another continent as light as a feather. 3 hour layover in Madrid. For some reason I couldn’t find my American to Euro plug converter before I left so I had to pay an outrageous amount at the airport. But fine. I‘m in good spirits as I begin this new journey.

“Plans are nothing, planning is everything”

This lasted until an hour before my flight from Madrid to Alicante when I realized I no longer had my planning notebook with me. Very careless of me. On my flight overseas I had switched seats and apparently forgot to take a couple of things I’d already put in the seat pocket in front of me, so when I left the plane I didn’t think of them. Very bad! In this notebook was all my planning for all my trainings on this trip, plus it was a record of all the seminars and trainings I’d done for the last three years. I plan  a lot—practice what I preach—so the trainings come out looking like they’re not planned. It’s not that I can’t recreate my planning for these sessions or even come up with fresh ideas that are even better; it’s that I now have to take the time to do it, and all the days in between my sessions now, which I planned to take time off totally for myself, I now have to spend planning. That’s a bummer! Oh well…