i just came back from a 10 days vacation in Italy. at my first start-up i would not have dared to take a vacation at this stage of the company, but being a bit older and with a bit more perspective i didn’t think twice before taking these days off.

i checked my emails daily (though not thanks to my iPhone, which after a few days decided not to connect to the local EDGE networks), do a couple of conference calls, but mostly i was able to clear my head and recharge my batteries (to the extent you can recharge anything when you are traveling with a 3yr and 1yr old..).

eating so much good food and drinking the local wines we agreed that we should seriously consider opening our first European branch in Tuscany.

a note re GPS:
tom brought his PDA/GPS thing. i must admit i am biased against his GPS. i hate her. she spends most of her time recalculating routes, telling you you’re driving too fast, suggesting U-turns and picking the worst possible path between point A and B.

the second car we took had a built-in GPS. it took us a while to get it going since the default language was German, and it was almost impossible to find how to change the interface to English (a big UI mistake). once we had it working it was a pleasure. she was much more polite (the British accent helped), she connected to the network to get traffic updates and changed course accordingly, a real treat after the abuse we got from Tom’s GPS in the first week.