I’m on a plane to Omaha as I finish up this week’s Friday File, ready to jump into another “Woodstock for Capitalists” weekend with the Annual Meeting for Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) and, more quietly, some other investor events and the Markel (MKL) Brunch.

This pilgrimage often helps me to reset my thinking as a long-term investor, and it’s fun to spend a weekend listening to Warren and Charlie’s Q&A session and hob-nobbing with some like-minded folks… and buying strange little doo-dads from the various Berkshire subsidiaries who participate in the festivities (I’ll be filling my suitcase with See’s peanut brittle, for sure, but who doesn’t need another set of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger rubber ducks? Maybe some Berkshire Hathaway cowboy boots?)

I’ve done a lot of traveling over the last couple weeks, helping my oldest child do some final college visits before making her decision about where to spend the next four years, so I’ve at least got some good anecdotal evidence that travel is back in a big way — the airplanes are all oversold and the airports are teeming with people, as has been the case for a few months, but now the hotels and highways are filling up, too… apparently $5 gas is not enough to scare people off the roads. And Berkshire Hathaway’s first in-person meeting since 2019 might have record crowds — the hotels are almost all booked to the rafters, like they were for my first visit back in 2015 for Berkshire’s 50th anniversary meeting, despite the fact that the meeting has also been available to watch remotely since 2016, making attendance a bit less compulsory for the Berkshire addict (Yahoo Finance has offered the live stream for years, but this time the deal has shifted to CNBC.com).

It’s not been an easy adjustment, this return to travel and crowds — judging by my experience in the New York to Delwaware stretch of highway last week, we’ve all spent the two years of COVID getting used to driving much faster, but forgetting how to drive in traffic. There were a shocking number of accidents on the road, mostly minor, so the typical six hour drive took ten hours as most of New England hurried home from spring break… thankfully there was only one really big accident, requiring fire trucks on both sides of I-95, but it wasn’t a Tesla on fire ...