Month: May 2022

Now that everyone who was with me has returned home, I can publish about last week. A group of six of us flew to Argentina for a high-volume dove shoot. I was something of a tagalong. The trip was purchased as a gift, only for COVID to delay it by a few years. There was a minimum number of hunters required to make the trip happen, so invitations were circulated back in Kentucky and Dad received one. He invited me along too to help fill out the numbers. I also brought to the group my ability to communicate in Spanish and my willingness to act as travel agent.

We stayed at a lodge outside Arroyito, a small city about an hour and a half east of Cordoba in country that is reminiscent of the Great Plains of the United States. Some parts of the lodge were almost comically built for Americans, especially the massive walk-in showers in the cabins, but overall the feel was modern estancia. While green roofs meant the complex lacked the grandeur of some of the old Spanish estates I have visited elsewhere on the continent, it was much nicer than I needed it to be for a shooting trip. The food was wonderful all week, with the lodge employing a chef just to cook for the guests (ten in total during our stay—we were joined by four others from East Texas). Since I was the only one who could converse with the kitchen staff, I also received preferential treatment in the form of customized orders and seconds and sometimes thirds of what I enjoyed. This being Argentina, that included steaks of various cuts and never less than two inches in thickness. Add in some chimichurri and not much more is needed for a great meal. You can even skip the chimichurri if you want.

For the shooting, each hunter is paired with a helper/gun boy, an ayudante in Spanish, and these were not boys but men who do this for a living. His job is to make your blind and reload your shotgun with a taped-up thumb to avoid blisters from loading hundreds of rounds. Mine was Mauricio. He was four months younger than me and spoke the best English of all of the ayudantes. He later told me that he picked me because I spoke the best Spanish, and we went back and forth all week switching between the two languages learning from each other. During the second half of the week, I shot together with Dad, which created the opportunity for three people to talk about him without him really being able to understand. Everyone was amused by much of that conversation.

There were morning and afternoon shoots to correspond with the flight of the doves. Sometimes we would stay in the field for lunch and sometimes we would return to the lodge. The drives were longer than anyone would have preferred, but the conversation was always entertaining in the way only conversation at hunt camp can be. In the evenings we would eat our massive dinners and then sit around talking or standing outside looking up at the Milky Way around a campfire. During part of looking upwards, I even saw some of the Starlink satellites moving as a line of lights. Let me tell you, that was a weird sight and one of the stranger things I’ve ever seen.

While the rest of the group returned to the United States after a return connection to Buenos Aires, I stayed in the Argentine capital and will be here for the next few weeks. This is an extension of the European experiment, though one that should be simpler as there is only one hour difference in time and I have a second monitor. It was jarring to be back in a bustling city after a week in the quiet countryside, but I have already shaken this off and started to find a rhythm.

Sunday was a strange day. It started with an overnight flight and maybe two hours of sleep, but I have been on a few long flights recently so that wasn’t the weird part. Nor was returning to a city I’d visited before. I’d been to each of the cities on our recent European jaunt at least once already. No, what made Sunday strange was trying to compress the best parts of what took me two weeks to explore before into a single day for the benefit of others. It was like trying to be the tour guide of all tour guides, yet my charges had so little by way of expectations that anything I showed them made them happy. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned there, but I’m not yet sure what it might be. In any event, the expectations can lengthen the joy of traveling as anticipation builds during the planning phase. I am not the only one in my group who has looked forward to this week for several years.

I have been accused of taking people on death marches before, and was yet again on Sunday, but this walking wasn’t bad. Besides, at the end of each leg of the journey was either food and drink or a change of clothes and a hot shower. I wanted my travel companions to get a feel, ideally a positive one, for a city I greatly enjoyed in my previous visit and hope to enjoy again soon. The best way I know to gain a feel for a place is to walk through it and eat its food, and this we did. I carefully selected the neighborhood just as I carefully chose the location of the hotel, and even during the early afternoon on Sunday there were inklings of the vibrancy that characterizes the place. I felt slightly insulted when they were surprised by how good lunch was, but I have come to expect that people will erroneously question my food choices.

We spent the afternoon on a whirlwind tour by private car. I directed the drivers from spot to spot. Once we arrived at a location, we exited the vehicles, we walked around the location, at least one of the members of our group took way too many pictures, I instructed the drivers where to go next, we got back into the vehicles, and off to the next destination we went. I tried to cram as much as possible into a half-day tour, a very American way of traveling but appropriate for the circumstances.

I was questioned even more about my choice in restaurant for dinner. As there was a nice brisk walk before we arrived from the hotel (chosen based largely on its location relative to that specific restaurant), the peanut gallery was in full voice by the time we arrived. Not even being greeted by champagne while we waited for our table was enough to silence the doubters. The meal did though, and I basked in the glorious silence that sets in during a feast when everyone is eating and no one wants to waste any precious time talking while all that food is just sitting there. That feeling and the satiation that came from the meal made for a very pleasant walk back to the hotel. Then we were off early the next morning, onto the next destination and the main event of the trip.

This week at work has been all about consolidation. We learned a number of lessons during our European sojourn that we are presently implementing. We continue to tighten our availability in order to improve our productivity, energy, and focus. We are making our intake process more standardized so that there is less slippage. We are building out improved documents as we learn best practices through doing more deals. We are consolidating relationships that we have made over the past few months that should prove fruitful for all involved. While we are taking a bit of a pause to incorporate what we learned into our working procedures, it isn’t much of a pause as we are moving towards what may be as many as seven or eight closings before the end of May. It is an exciting time for the business.

Over the weekend, I was also reminded of how important family and friends are. This is a different form of consolidation of some of the ideas I had while abroad but no less important. I was in Kentucky for a wedding-retirement-Derby party. On the drive, I picked up my brother and sister-in-law at the airport and was able to spend some time alone with them over dinner. On Saturday, a large number of people gathered at my parents’ home for the party and I was thrust back into the social life of a small town. This meant a great deal of talking about the business and of what has been recorded in these newsletters as many of my most faithful readers were in attendance.

It was decided that the most fun way to handle the horse race itself was to have a random drawing for horses in two pots. I did much the same once in college and hilarity ensued as everyone yelled at the television for two minutes, but this crowd was more educated about horse racing and more sedate. Well, most of the crowd was more educated about horse racing. I spent the race giving a running commentary to two of my young cousins who had never seen a horse race before. They were transfixed by everything going on around them during the race but I’m sure they will need further instruction. Everyone at the track was stunned by the result, so much so that you could almost hear the silence through the television, but somehow no one at the party was surprised when I won the loser pool. Yes, it may have been a random drawing, but I drew the horse that came in last place and so won the whole pool. Because of course that’s what happened.

The weekend was a marked contrast to much of the time I spent in Europe over the last month alone. This provides yet more fodder as I continue to think about how I want to live this phase of my life now that we have proven to ourselves that we can work from elsewhere.

When this post went out, I was aboard a plane flying back to the United States after almost four weeks in Europe. This was the first real test of whether we can truly work from anywhere in this legal practice, and it has been a qualified success. There are some additions that will be needed (i.e. getting a portable monitor like I mentioned last week), but our deals have kept progressing and our long-term clients have had their legal needs met. A few other observations follow.

This was my first time in Europe in the spring. The mornings and evenings have required jackets of varying thickness, but that is preferable to the rising humidity and temperatures in the high 80s to which I am returning. It has been an ideal time to be here. I have noted the temperature ranges and may take steps to increase the number of days during the year when I am in such climates.

Being in Europe and working west coast hours is not viable for me. The nine-hour time difference has not meshed with my early rising. This has not been helped by a lack of blackout curtains in my accommodations. I’m not sure what the answer will be to this problem, but further experimentation will be required to find a solution that doesn’t leave me dragging through half of the afternoons during the week.

Eating out at every meal has been both blessing and curse. It has given me a better feel for these cities, yes, but it has also been a frequent reminder that most of this trip has been spent alone and has meant that my diet has not been as regimented as I prefer. I will tweak these protocols when I take my next sojourn.

In order not to sacrifice on location for my Airbnb rentals, I opted for private rooms instead of having an entire place to myself in both Vienna and Berlin. Neither one worked as I had hoped. Instead of gaining a guide, I felt more like an intruder living a parallel life under the same roof in both apartments. Having a place to myself will also help with the food issue as I am more comfortable cooking somewhere that isn’t someone else’s kitchen who is sitting in the living room.

Being with other people created the potential for greater enjoyment. Some of the more enjoyable meals on this trip were in busy Parisian cafes with colleagues. And my weekend in Berlin had the most variation and spontaneity of any weekend so far this year as I leaned into the activities on offer as I reconnected with an old friend. This took me to a family birthday celebration, a Kreuzberg bar, some great doner kebab, and a meetup with a group of people I wish I could meet again. It wasn’t that the activities were only possible in Berlin (though there are few places that do doner kebab as well as here where the food was invented), it was that I was thrown into groups of people who accepted and even embraced my presence, the sort of thing I have never managed without some help even in the English-speaking world. It has left me wondering about possibilities. I don’t plan to take any action on these thoughts immediately, but it has left me wondering.