I’m New Hampshire-bound this afternoon, flying down through Boston to spend a week with my longtime colleagues at Yankee Publishing in Dublin.

I’ve been visiting Dublin for 20 years, 3 or 4 times a year.

In 2003 I started creating an email folder containing all the travel-related emails for each trip; there are 34 of them now, and this trip will be number 35. With the trips that happened between 1996 and 2003 I suspect I’m coming up on 50 trips south.

Most of those trips have been by myself, but sometimes they were with my brother Johnny, and, especially in the early days, in the summer, they were with Catherine and, later, with Oliver too. We once spent a week in Dublin, NH and then drove to Boston and got on a plane and landed, the next morning, in Dublin, Ireland.

I’ve been working remotely with Yankee for so long that it’s second-nature now; these occasional visits are an important part of why we work so well together. It’s important to put faces to new names at the company. And it’s important to sit around a real, physical table with folks I otherwise only see on the other end of a weekly Skype conference call.

It’s also important to go out to lunch and supper together, so that we can remind ourselves that, outside of work, we have other lives and interests. It helps to make us whole people to each other.

So this afternoon I’ll get on Air Canada 7753 from Charlottetown to Halifax, then, an hour later, Air Canada 8895 from Halifax to Boston. When I land in Boston I’ll pick up a car from Hertz and drive the 90 minutes north – along Route 93, Route 95, Route 3 and Route 101 – to the Jack Daniels Motor Inn in Peterborough, NH a place I’ve been staying for years and years and years.

And tomorrow morning I’ll get up, have breakfast at Aesop’s Tables, and then drive up to Dublin, NH to start my workday.

As a special bonus, I’ll be in New Hampshire for Primary Day on Tuesday, as I was 12 years ago, and I plan to take in a variety of campaign rallies on Tuesday night in Nashua and Manchester; I’ll report in to Island Morning with a post-Primary review on Wednesday morning.