Traveling isn’t fun without family

While I haven’t had many opportunities throughout my life, I love to travel.

I envy my friends who get to go on vacations to far away places. I heard the other day that someone I know through work, who is now retired, went to 47 countries last year.

That’s the life.

I was fortunate enough to travel a handful of times on business for a previous job that took me to Texas, New Jersey and even Dubai.

Those trips were fun, of course, but at the time I was single, on my own and was just able to hop on a plane and do my own thing.

It’s different now.

I have a wife and a daughter with whom I had never been apart from for more than five days; trips to Las Vegas for work each of the last two Septembers.

Last week, though, was hands down the hardest time I’ve had as a father.

My employer hosts a National Sales Seminar each year for our roofing contractors. It’s an all-hands-on-deck event that requires planning and coordination from multiple departments: marketing, sales, customer service and quality assurance. We host breakouts, general sessions and various parties for 2,000 of our contractor partners.

This year the event was in Nashville, Tennessee.

Coincidentally, the largest trade show we attend as exhibitors, the International Roofing Expo (IRE), happened concurrently with our Seminar.

Less than ideal to plan our two biggest events at the same time.

While 95% of the above-mentioned departments were in Nashville, IRE was in Las Vegas and I, as the trade show coordinator, had to attend.

In my role, I coordinate all of our trade shows, from planning the booth layout, to securing services and exhibit items, as well as a myriad of other tasks.

And, this year I had to go to IRE for the three days of setup, the three days of the show and then one full day of tear down.

I’d check in on Jan. 17 and leave eight days later.

Seven nights in Las Vegas sounds like a fun time, right?

It is, just not when you leave your entire world back home 1,000 miles away.

Chrissy and I made it a plan to video chat each night prior to Baby Schanz going to bed.

Our daughter is just at the age where she can recognize faces on the phone, and it melted my heart the first time she saw my face come up and immediately said “Da-da!” Sometimes, the time difference made that video call a bit difficult because bedtime is right as the expo ended for the day or around dinner time.

On two occasions, I was with my team walking back to the hotel and I had to break off to hop on a quick video call before my daughter went to bed.

It was so hard being away from her for that long. She’s had difficulty sleeping in her own bed recently so she’s been joining my wife and I in ours at night. That meant I was waking up every morning with my daughter next to me. It warms my happy heart to see her first thing each day.

But in a dark Vegas hotel room, I was waking up by myself, still tired from the day before.

I just wasn’t getting quality sleep, partly because I was sick for the fifth time in six weeks.

The first couple of nights were OK to get through. But by night five and six, the expo itself was over, the rest of my team left for their respective parts of the country and I was left by myself again after spending the first two nights without my team.

I just wanted to be home with my wife and daughter.

They are my world — the reason I get out of bed each day.

Seven nights being away from home is long enough as is.

Being gone from my girls for that long is seven nights too many.