While heading back to the ATL airport today, I struck up a conversation with two of the other passengers in the airport shuttle who were in town for a totally different education conference (CCCC) about composition skills. We found commonality around the topic of social media and composition skills. After chatting for a few moments, another lady in the shuttle turned around and said, “Wait, are you Tom Krieglstein?”

Her awareness of me wasn’t from anything in particular, but rather that she just “knows about me and my wife” and has even talked with my wife. She pronounced my last name correctly which took me off guard too.

We both got off the shuttle at the same airport terminal, but she hurried off without giving me a chance to probe more about how she knows us, nor did she show any interest to engage more.

My life story is fairly public and some people are lurkers who watch and learn from my mistakes from the sidelines, but this is the first time I’ve had someone totally random, in a public area, recognize me without being able to pinpoint to a specific thing.

If you are flying out of LGA on US Airways, you should just expect something to go wrong.

My final destination tonight was ATL, but due to some unknown reason I’m stuck in CLT with a 6am flight to ATL in the morning on a different airline.

Technically the cause for me missing my connection in CLT to ATL wasn’t US Airways fault, so I was on my own to pay for the hotel.

All the decent hotels around CLT were starting at $90 which would be an unexpected expense for the trip. Luckily, Priceline lets you “name your own price” for the same day, even if it’s 11pm at night. Note that not all hotels do this with Priceline. I’ve always had great luck with NYOP for hotels and rental cars. Sure enough once again Priceline found me a room at a 4-star Renaissance hotel for only $45. Thank you Priceline! Now if only you could help me with my 6am flight so I get more than 3 hours of sleep tonight.

“A traveler sees what he/she sees. A tourist sees what he/she has come to see.” – G.K Chesterton

If an email scam happens to make it past my gmail spam blocker, I like to consider myself decently good at quickly spotting and deleting it. My expert deciphering skills have come from years of flexing my judgement on repeated scams in my inbox. I’m smarter now than I was eight years gets ago.

On my trip to Boston today, I watched as two highschool students tried to decipher if an email that one of them received was a scam. The friend kept saying it was a scam, but the one who got it was still optimistic. It was cute watching them navigate their judgement to the conclusion that it was a scam.

I could tell right away it was a scam when one girl said the prize amount was offered in British Pounds. Too me that’s obvious, but to her that was her first encounter with that type of scam. Next time she’ll be smarter.

Makes me wonder as I write about my journey of growth on this blog if someone who’s “been there, done that” is sitting back smiling as they watch me learn how to fish for the first time.

We all have the potential to be a student and teacher to someone else.

This morning my four hour flight to South Dakota left LGA at 6:05am. Most people would probably only be ok doing that type of flight once a year. As a speaker, 6am flights are totally common. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve headed to the airport before sunrise.

It hurts me every time I leave town on a weekend for a training and leave Annie. It hurts me every time I go to bed early and set my alarm clock for 3:30am so I make it to my flight on time.

The real pain of speaking is missing the life moments with family and friends at home while on the road in an airplane, hotel, or rental car.

People often tell me they’d be excited to jet around the country and I always say the same thing. It’s a ton of fun for the first 10-20 times, but then every time you have to wake up before the sun to just barley catch your flight by running through the airport and get a neck cramp from sleeping on the plane and the rental car can’t find your reservation and you live off of Subway and you check into the hotel only to go up three floors to find your room key doesn’t work and you wake up early again to drop off the rental car and sprint through the airport to once again just barley make your flight, it can wear you down. But the first 10-20 times are exciting!

View from the front of our house.

He may be on the other side of the world, but with a crystal clear reception, I was able to chat with my dad today about his trip to China, his new novel that was just published, and his upcoming talk about being a student of Adorno in Germany.