Traveling as a non-normal human

Dear fellow freaks,

I'm sitting at the Barcelona airport waiting for my flight back home to Germany. My company's European HQ is in Barcelona and we had our company Christmas party here on Thursday and I went to visit a customer in Madrid on Wednesday. (I'll pause to give you a chance to have sympathy for my plight.) Since I work from home (software sales) and I had some personal flexibility this week, I decided to fly down Monday and stay through the weekend, traveling to Castellón de la Plana on the weekend - I chose it at random on the map, got a rental car and drove down there.

Scheduling the customer meeting, booking the flights, hotels, train ticket to Madrid, and rental car for the weekend were the easy part. The part of every trip that causes me consternation is the choice of which watch(es) to bring. I've learned the hard way what a pita (the abbreviation, not the bread) it is to take more than one watch on a trip so this time I only took two! Ok, so one was my G-Shock and I don't count that because I don't have to take any special care of it and I'm not worried about it getting stolen or lost. Ok, ok, so technically I had three "watches", but the third one was my Garmin vivosmart 4, which I wear on my right wrist just for counting steps and vibrating my wrist for calls and messages. I don't consider it a watch...because it's not a watch.

Since you probably clicked on this post because of the picture, you know that the only watch (ahem...see above) I brought with my is my Cartier Santos. I'm guessing some of you can relate, but before I became watch-infected, I used to walk out the door on a trip without a thought to what was on my wrist. Since I joined the dark side, it has been quite different. Pre-trip, I run every conceivable situation through my head: Office with colleagues, customer meeting, riding a bus or taxi in a strange city, swimming (?!), hiking, rescuing princesses from castle keeps, etc.

I tend to panic that a situation could arise for which I do not have the perfect watch on my wrist and it seems like lately whenever I've been faced with this decision, I almost always choose the Cartier Santos. It looks just as great with jeans and a t-shirt as with a suit. It doesn't give off the db (another abbreviation) vibes that a couple other watches I own might so I don't have to worry that a customer could come away with an unfavorable image of me...and it's even swimproof (100m) in case the hotel has a pool and I don't want to leave my watch in the hotel room (I never do!).

As usual, the Santos was the perfect companion and, as usual, absolutely no one noticed it, even when I slyly pulled my sleeve up for no apparent reason. But I did notice a coworker wearing a Moonswatch, which outed him as a watch guy so now we have something much cooler to talk about than work.

I bought the Santos for myself for my 48th birthday in January 2022 and have not for one second regretted it. It's so versatile...and just plain beautiful. I'm even trying to tell myself that the big fat scratch I discovered last week on the bezel adds to its charm.

How many watches do you take on trips? Short trips? Long trips? How do you decide? Do you worry much about theft or, worse yet, being mugged for your watch?

Yours in addiction,

Rick