Day One

Right, Day One. This gig starts early, as you know. As in 7:00 am. Allison is more of a morning person than I could ever claim to be, and she doesn't even drink coffee. Clearly, this makes her a mutant. I kid!

That, up there, is what it's like first thing in the morning. And it got a lot louder. Like Rhianna louder. And then the LoCash Cowboys came out and played country music. I nearly died, and not in a good way.

The intro session was actually quite good -- funny speakers, much ooh'ing and ahh'ing from we the people. Oh, haha, the key speaker's name was Chip Heath. We liked him -- great blend of humor and message in his speech. He also made excellent use of gifs in his powerpoint presentation.

The sessions were quite good as well and we made good use of some free time at the Solutions Pavilion annoying people and scoring toys. Allison and I are planning to debrief on the plane (oh, won't our seatmate heart us) so we can share our knowledge with you all via a mind meld.

Then this evening... Nash Vegas, over in the Opry... something or other. We picked our way across parking lots and lawns in the dark until we found it, realizing only then that we could have walked through the hotel to reach the same destination. No, we were not drunk.

I submit for your approval videos and photos of the party. In case you were wondering (and I know you were) there were Elvises present. That's right, Elvis in plural. We had a Rock Elvis, A Skinny Vegas Elvis, and A Fat Debauched Vegas Elvis. They were fun and made for some entertaining Accountants Gone Wild.

Here's FDVE doing a bit of dancing.

FDVE was breaking... and the Accountants turned on him. He was all right in the end. We spotted him at the bar doing shots.

There was line dancing, always a big hit. Ooooh, I got to do some kind of Cotton Eye Joe dancy thing for a minute. I have video but the wifi connection in this room is poor and won't let me upload. *sob*

Allison with FDVE and SVE.

More with the Elvises. These guys love their jobs.

See ya'll tomorrow.

Oh, hai, Nashville.

Aaaaand here we are, in Nashville. We got in yesterday, actually, but I haven't had time to blog. There's no app for the iPhone, apparently. *eyeroll*

Logan at sunrise. Earrrrrrrrrrrly.

So, let's see... fairly uneventful travel. We connected in MD through BWI and I did nearly manage to kill several people trying to stuff my suitcase into the overhead bin. A very well meaning but misguided gentleman tried to "help" me and instead sent the suitcase flying too far to the left. Nice to hear a loud chorus of "OOOOOHS" from the fellow passengers. Then I got the stinkeye from the guy sitting below said overhead bin because I was in his personal space. Maybe get up and help out or get out of the way there, tough guy.

The hotel is, as you know from last year's stories massive. Like ridiculous massive and we've gotten turned around several times.

I'll post photos and vids from Day One in a moment.

Beer. I had one with lunch because nearly killing people with my luggage takes a lot out of me.

Nash Vegas

12 hours of travel. Yep, 12 hours to get from Boston to Nashville. Yee-flipping-ha. Cathy assures me she spent 9 hours Sunday traveling the same route. Suffice to say that Nashville is not the easiest place to get to.

The hotel is ridiculously large. I believe the hotel shuttle driver threw out some absurd number like 25 acres. The hotel shuttle itself was ridiculously large -- it was the type of bus you normally see transporting rock bands cross country. One of the passengers remarked that the bus was much nicer and possibly larger than the plane she flew earlier in the day. There is also a honky-tonk just nearby that serves excellent BBQ. I just want to go to a honky-tonk, period, don't care what the serve.

Cathy claims that she walked 2 miles to find a coffee kiosk this morning... only to discover that it was closed. She promptly interrogated a hapless hotel employee who directed her to a second kiosk... another 2 miles away. Apparently, Cathy's expression was sufficiently, er, animated to prompt the hapless hotel employee to volunteer to walk her to the second kiosk. Cathy declined the escort. She did manage to score some joe.

My plane seemed to suffer a power failure, as in all lights went out and everything became eerily quiet. Happily, this occurred just as we pulled up to the jetway in Nashville. I thought for a moment that we'd need to use the inflatable emergency slides to deplane, which would have made this, officially, the best. trip. EVER. Sadly, we were forced to deplane using the jetway like regular mortals.

I haven't actually seen Cathy, by the way, because I checked into my room at 9:30 pm and she was no doubt catching up on her television watching. We'll catch up over breakfast tomorrow and Cathy can tell me (again) that I eat as much as a man. Dang, now I'm thinking about the dinner I skipped. Breakfast will be EPIC.

Day 3, pre-DCA

Day 3 is winding down, tho, sadly, the smell of boiled Maryland crab and Old Bay lingers pretty much wherever we go. Allison, Jenn, and I are sitting in the atrium of the hotel waiting for Karen to finish her last session and then it's off to DCA we go.

Wherever I've gone today I've heard stories about the fairly epic levels of partying last night. After 10 pm, lots of people went upstairs to the hotel's disco (that's right, we're calling it a disco) the Sky Bar, and things went on til at least 2:30 am. There's a tale of some man who lost some kind of bet and was then forced to wear a navy blue Deltek sweater vest with no shirt underneath; sadly, I didn't see him last night or I would have chased him around with my camera.

Accountants Gone Wild

Tonight was the big party, Celebrate Insight, and it was, as always, a lot of fun -- good food, lots of loud music, and, as Karen pointed out, a lot of accountants letting their hair down.

Crabs. Lots of 'em.

Crab wranglers

Click play -- sound definitely suggested.

These are for Britt, especially

Which of the GovWin Girls rode the mechanical surfboard and, prior to understanding exactly what the thing did, declared "I don't care what it is, I'll go on it..."?

Beer and Haagen-Dazs FTW

Dancing Karens

Cha-cha'ing

Making friends in the lobby. Bit waxy.

Oh, and in case you were interested, hotel engineering had to come up, haul the fool safe out of the armoire and drill holes in it to basically break in and rescue the laptop -- over an hour of waiting and working on it total. They left a new safe behind that I am avoiding. Sheesh.

breaking bad

okay, allison and i have been watching different parties of hotel people attempt to get into my safe which i locked this morning and is now, in the words of one of the hotel people, "acting the fool". mind you we could be noshing & boozing it up. hopefully this saga ends soon.

My kingdom for a cow

Medium coffee, Viennese roast... and there is no dairy *anywhere* to add. Moo.