exhaustion

Its official folks, I'm ready to head home.  The ITiCSE conference is over.  The paper has been presented, I've been to a dozen or more sessions.  I'm tired.  I'd like to get something to eat, but all the restaurants in the area are not even open for dinner yet, and its 7pm!  This is a good conference.  I appreciate that many of the sessions seem a bit more technical than would be typical at SIGCSE and I like that.

Although I was here alone at the conference I've met some really nice people, and made some good connections with others doing research in areas that overlap with Runestone Interactive in one way or another.  I've got a lot of ideas about what may be good directions to go next with the project, and lots of ideas on some new literature that I should be studying.

So, whats left of this trip?  Tomorrow I'm taking a tour of Cesarea that will start at 7:30 tomorrow morning and will end with me getting dropped off at the airport at 2pm.  The buzz at the conference this afternoon was about getting out of Isreal.  Apparently, security is much tougher going out of the country than it is going in.  So it is recommended to be at the airport 3 hours ahead of your flight.  I'll fly to Heathrow and I've got a room at the Sofitel.  That just seems to make the most sense.  I don't have to find and pay for a bus to drop me off at another hotel, as I can just walk.  It has free WiFi, and it will be easy for me to walk back over and go through security in the morning to rejoin the group.  I really miss being with the group.   Saturday we fly from London to Chicago and then we still have five hours of driving to get us home.  Its actually hard to imagine that I will be home in roughly 48 + 8 hours.  The +8 is the hours that are lost to timezone changes.

As I was sitting outside my hotel writing this I had the good fortune to be invited to dinner by one of my new colleagues that I met at ITiCSE.  David was traveling with his family and it was very nice to have a relaxing dinner again.