i have traveled quite a bit for business over the past few years, and generally it’s a pleasant experience. I roll into a city, get settled in, find my bearings, and then get to work. i use the flight in to focus on objectives and firm up my plan for how to get the results I’m after.

But traveling this week was different. on Monday, the flight to Chicago was packed. I was kind of surprised by that, to be honest. It was after I arrived in Chicago that all the alerts started from the home office that events are being postponed and travel plans curtailed.

On the flight back, there was a nervous air on a half-empty flight. people were curt but cordial and everyone was either masking or constantly dosing on hand sanitizer.

At O’hare I grabbed some McDonald’s because I knew that even Covid-19 couldn’t survive on their food. And I sat down at a semi-circular booth that was somewhat isolated. Not a minute later, a guy from India asks if he can sit across from me. He was traveling home after a trip to photograph owls outside of Duluth, Mn. It was pretty ironic because I grew up in Duluth.

Anyway, we started chatting about what we do, and then about photography, and then how weird it was to be traveling right now, and how normally we’d shake hands, but we all got the memo from the home office that we don’t do that anymore. We showed each other some images, his were amazing.

And then I heard about the lawyer who got contact Corona, and that his kids’ schools are shut down and people are self-quarantining. And conferences are being postponed.

I’m home now, about to go to a conference, and wondering if that is really such a great Idea. I mean, the guy who got it was a lawyer. How many of the lawyers and bankers that I’ll be in the room with might’ve been around that guy, or around someone he was around, in the past two weeks. In a city like this?