Jetting off to California for a few days

This morning I'm heading to the Buffalo airport to catch a flight to California.

I'll return on Sunday.

My father asked me to make the trip to Bakersfield while my brothers are also in town for my parents' 52nd anniversary.

My mother has Alzheimer's and the disease has progressed quite a bit in the past year, and even though my travel schedule had already included a planned swing through Bakersfield next month, I thought I should take this trip as well.

Which brings up another point: Quite without any real planning, I've developed a travel schedule over the next couple of months.

Around Sept. 14, I have my annual trip to Chicago for our independent publishers' conference, and then I was invited to speak in San Francisco around Sept. 22 by J-Lab (an educational journalism group) and the Online News Association (the largest organization in the country representing online news publishers of all types and sizes). It's in that SF trip that I was able to wrangle a layover in Bakersfield for a couple of days.

Then, some time before the end of the year, Billie and I hope to make another trip (a week-long trip) to California. Billie isn't going on any of the trips mentioned above and also deserves a chance to see her family.

We started trying to put together the money for this trip before these other trips were scheduled and it's important we follow through on these plans as best we can. I'm hoping we can put this together for November.

I regret so much travel so tightly packed together, but sometimes things just fall into place in unexpected ways.

Meanwhile, Billie will still be in Batavia running the site. Lisa Ace will be taking care of business. There are stories I can post while away. We have some help lined up for coverage this weekend of Summer in the City, the East Pembroke Mud Races and a couple of other events. 

We'll also have our news partner, WBTA, available to help out.

If you see anything interesting and get a picture or information, you can always email it to howard at the batavian dot com (of course, reformat that into a proper email address).

I believe there will still be interesting things here to read and discuss over the next few days.