It’s been a weekend of coincidences since coming to the Axon Guidance and Neural Plasticity meeting here at Cold Spring Harbor. After a week busting my balls trying to get some experiments completed before the 5-day conference, I left early Saturday morning for my flight down to New York. As always, I was running so late I had to catch a cab to the airport, arriving only 5 minutes before boarding, but only to find out that my flight was delayed by more than 3 hours (of course). Luckily, I ran into an old college friend of mine who was on the same flight, so we got to sit down at the airport coffee shop and catch up on our past few years while waiting for our plane to arrive. Yesterday, at one of the poster sessions here, I noticed the name of an old high school friend on a poster from a lab at Yale. I spoke extensively with the post-doc who was presenting the poster, only to realize that I had already met her when I bumped into that friend about a month ago at the Ikea in New Haven! Aside from these random blasts from the past, the conference has otherwise been quite disappointing. Among the exhaustive volume of talks and posters from 9am-11pm each day, I have yet to find much that I didn’t already know. Fortunately, the weather had been beautiful, and the relaxing environment out here is finally giving me a chance to kick back for a couple of days.