A year ago I was recently arrived in the UK for a month long trip to celebrate my 50th birthday. Turning 50 felt a lot different than turning 40. For my 40th, Nicole threw me a great party with lots of friends. For my 50th I wanted to go somewhere remote and be alone. Times change, eh?

The being alone would come later in the trip though. After an overnight stay in London and a great dinner at Dishoom with our friend Namrata, Nicole and I took the train to Birmingham for the UK Games Expo. This is a convention we’d heard a lot about and wanted to check out, and working a con meant the flights would be a business expense. You need to work it when you’re a small business owner.

We were able to do UK Games Expo thanks to the help of friends. Dave Salisbury owns the excellent Fan Boy Three game store in Manchester, and he gave us space in his booth and helped us get product in to sell. Huge thanks to Dave, Heidi, Scott, and their whole crew for hosting us and giving us a way to try out the show without committing to a full booth. The convention was good and quite sizable, easily the biggest one I’ve been to in the UK.

John Kovalic was also over and he whisked us offsite for some terrific Indian food one night. UK Games Expo is at a convention center outside Birmingham and the food options were not great, so this was appreciated. Later in the show the three of us met up with James Wallis and Marc Gascoigne and that was a delightful reunion. We’ve all been friends since the 90s but are rarely in the same place at the same time.

I’m going to try to post more about this trip over the coming month. For one thing, I never did write about it, apart from my social media posts as it was happening. It’s also been on my mind quite a bit as my 51st birthday approaches. Travel has been a huge part of my adult life. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and I’m thankful the game industry has enabled me to go from Finland to Brazil to New Zealand and many places in between. 2019 was a particularly gonzo year for travel: 101 days on the road, traveling over 81,000 miles on 11 trips to 5 countries and 40 cities while attending 9 conventions. So it is now deeply weird to not only be home all the time, but also to have no idea when I might be able to travel again. Every convention we had planned to attend this year has been cancelled. We had hoped to go to Prague with a group of gamers this summer but that too is off. I just couldn’t have imagined when I left for my trip last year how much different the world would be in 2020.

So in between my curated quarantine posts and me screaming about America’s descent into fascism, I’m going to look back on what turned out to be a very memorable trip indeed. There’s still so much I want to see but for now I’ll just have to look back and hope in the future the world won’t be quite so on fire.