We returned on Wednesday night from a great week in the Maritimes. Nova Scotia, specifically. It was a really nice trip, and a good length of time to be away. Most of our time was spent in a town south of Halifax called Chester, where my wife’s grandfather and some of her extended family live. Chester is a wonderful and beautiful little seaside town which is mostly seasonal. Chester’s inhabitants are mostly wealthy folks from abroad who summer there, so the town is rather vacant in the fall and winter. The town of about 2,000 has a yacht club, a theatre, and, as I’ve told many people before, probably the best Canada Day fireworks I’ve ever experienced anywhere.

Two days were spent in Halifax, at my wife’s cousin’s wedding. Attending the wedding was the purpose, ultimately, of this trip.

The weather was mixed – some days beautiful, others windy and rainy. Overall, it was nice to see some extended family and visit some familiar places. I’d previously never visited the east coast in the fall, and the colors are amazing.

I’ve been back in Calgary for a couple of days and I leave again tomorrow for Ontario – Toronto until Thursday, and then Ottawa until the following Monday. My Toronto trip is for a marketing conference that I am really looking forward to. It’s being put on by Marketing Magazine, and features appearances by some industry giants, such as Tim Armstrong, President of Google; Dave Balter, author and CEO of BzzAgent; the publisher of the Globe and Mail; the publisher of The Walrus, and pretty much every heavy duty media mogul in Canada. The conference also includes many of these individuals at breakout sessions, those which I am attending look to be quite interesting and hopefully useful in my job, so I hope to come back to work having learned a lot. The day after the conference ends, I leave for Ottawa, where my magazine is, for the first time, participating in the Ottawa Wine and Food Show. Unfortunately, this means that this year I don’t get to take in the ritzy and relaxing wine festival in Whistler, because the dates overlap, but that’s okay, because the Ottawa festival presents a great opportunity for my magazine in a relatively untapped market, and I’m proud to be taking the lead on the relationship.

I’m back on November 10, and a week later it’s off to Toronto again, this time for meetings and a wine festival. I love all this traveling, but maybe I’ll have different impressions once November is done.