Around 13,495 miles, more accurately, but the past few weeks have yielded many a small, shitty pack of airline peanuts. It began by spanning the continental US, having first been on the East Coast (Charlotte, for client presentations) and then the West Coast (Los Angeles, for user interviews and client workshops) shortly after. A couple days after returning from LA, I wrapped up the 3 weeks in the air with a trip to London for a Nansen all-branch gathering. Now that I'm back on solid ground for a stretch, I wanted to recall a few things in particular.

While the Charlotte trip primarily revolved around meetings and a couple presentations, the subsequent travel out West was more focused on discovery and pre-study for a large impending project. As such, each day was chock full of new learnings, copious notes, and worn-down pencils culled from the varied client interactions. The first day was comprised of 15 user interviews (my personal single-day record) over 9 hours and 2 separate locations...as well as my first-ever In-N-Out Burger (yum). While Day 2 was meeting and review-focused, Day 3 consisted of my all-day workshop session.

I led around a dozen people at the client's corporate headquarters through a series of discovery based exercises, inclusive of feature prioritization, target user group ranking, and visual design preferences. These sessions are incredibly rewarding and fruitful in the core information they ultimately yield.

Following the workshop, I took a couple days to visit my friend Christina in San Jose, a brief hour flight from L.A. Drinks by the pool? Not quite, my friends. Once in San Jose, she was kind enough to indulge my geek factor and drive me around to every tech company campus I've wanted to visit: Googleplex, Facebook HQ, LinkedIn, Yahoo, etc. Primary amongst them all, of course, was the Apple Campus at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino.

The magnitude of my colossally stupid grin from being outside Apple Headquarters was only eclipsed by the amount of branded merchandise I purchased in the Corporate Store. The bag slung over my shoulder in the above photo contained no less than 3 shirts, 2 mouse pads, and a mug. And oh, what a fine mug it is.

2 days after returning from San Jose, it was back in the air to London for Nansen's annual all-branch conference (a.k.a. the Nansen Awesome Premium Conference #napc). Over the course of the next four days, the teams from Chicago and Stockholm joined our UK counterparts to commiserate, share knowledge via talks and presentations, and have the occasional cocktail.

The above pensive moment preceding my presentation to all Nansen staff was admittedly one of my few lucid ones, during the final days of this last leg of travel; I was pretty depleted at this stage. However, I cannot imagine having a more productive few weeks. Following the flight back home, exiting the cab from O'Hare to the smell of tepid urine in downtown Chicago was like catching a waft of CK1. Home, my friends. Drink it in.

Photo credits include: Nansen