After months of collaborating on Steem, @yabapmatt and I enjoyed meeting for the first time yesterday downtown in Saint Petersburg, Florida (USA)! We took this quick photo together (technically Matt's wife took it) after a lovely dinner at the Sundial with our families!

We got dinner at Locale Market as seen at https://localegourmetmarket.com/ which made eating with our two children easier because each was able to run around outside. I spent about half the time with my daughter Madeleine riding up and down the escalators while Matt and I enjoyed a few minutes to talk about life and Steem together.

What surprised me was the amazing timing for this! Matt was not planning in advance to be near me and ended up messaging me on discord from https://jerrybanfield.com/contact/ the night before he might be in town. I did not even see his message until the next day and managed to meet him within a few hours of seeing it! The main casualty was @laurabanfield's yoga session which she opted to skip to help with entertaining our daughter because without her we would have spent 100% of the time riding an escalator up and down! As is, we rode is so many times the security guard asked us to stop.

I thought to share this because it helps us a lot to make deeper relationships with each other when we meet up in person! Steem has been more effective than anything else I have used online for building new relationships and I am grateful for the chance to meet @yabapmatt in person after months of working together on Steem starting with his Steem bot tracker at https://steembottracker.com/.

@yabapmatt is one of the witnesses I am voting for at https://steemit.com/~witnesses. Matt is a full time working father interested in doing Steem full time someday. Will we help him and thousands more of us make the leap to Steem full time because I like this most days better than a "real job?"

Love,
Jerry Banfield