Winging my way home from a solid week in the South… the longest I’ve been away from San Francisco since coming home from my round-the-world trip in April 2009.

Work was the impetus for this journey — in my day job as a user-interface software engineer I work at a startup in San Francisco with an office in the Atlanta suburbs. For a company of barely a hundred employees we’re remarkably dispersed: in addition to the SF and Atlanta facilities, we have people in Austin, TX; Minneapolis, MN, Washington, DC, and Toronto, Canada. The magic of high-speed connectivity stitches us together some, but occasionally it’s worthwhile to garner some good old-fashioned facetime.

Business travel may seem humdrum, but the opportunity for observation nevertheless abounds. To kick things off I headed to Washington, DC over the weekend, where I now have four different friends from three completely different stages of life (L.A., Chicago, and way back from high school in Montreal) living in the city and surrounds. A couple of them I hadn’t seen in almost (or over) a decade. In a sense, this was a mini re-enactment of the connections I made in my travels — that global spider-web of connections I wrote about in Wander the Rainbow. It’s a commonplace scenario for most professionals in the United States: our circle of friends expands even as many avail themselves of the opportunities and mobility of this continent-sized country. The result: friends scattered all over. It’s sometimes an effort to try and stay in touch with them all, but it’s an effort eminently worthwhile. All those social networking sites help!

Even in Atlanta the party continued: Amid co-workers plying me with Southern cuisine (including barbecue and colorfully-named sodas of dubious health benefit), I managed to sneak away and visit yet another high school chum who’d relocated to the Peachtree city (yes, they have way too many roads named “Peachtree,” some of which intersect each other!) We spent a Tuesday evening catching up and reminiscing, as well as keeping two adorable, gregarious kids entertained with the Lightsaber app on my iPhone.

The South often gets a bad rap in the rest of the country, but my experiences in both DC and Atlanta belied that: a friend of mine once remarked that Washington is a big northeastern city cross-pollinated with a small southern town. It’s got the intimacy and charm of the latter while retaining the bustle and international flavor of the former (tip: a terrific “pan-Mediterranean” eatery in Dupont Circle made for a fabulous dinner one night). Atlanta, meanwhile, offered up congeniality enough to confirm all those cliches about Southern hospitality. And the weather, sultry and hot the entire time (though it had cooled off some in DC following an epic electrical storm right before my arrival — felled tree limbs everywhere) was actually a nice change from the chill of San Francisco.

Well, not entirely: chill weather is easy to find in the South… just go into any building, where the turbocharged A/C is cranked so high I found myself donning layers. It’s Northern California inside-out!

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