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.

Day 2

It's lunchtime at the Gaylord National and we're refueling over baked stuffed potatoes and chili. Sessions today have been useful, tho Allison wandered in to an Advanced Deployment session and finally called it quits after 30 minutes of talking over integrating Windows security in IIS... I, of course, stayed and enjoyed further talk of Virtual Machines (supported or not) and SQL Report Services. Juicy stuff my friends... no really, it is, and I love it.

Day 1 wrap up

Day 1 is in the bag and it seems we all learned a good deal both useful (at the conference sesssions) and useless (a cell phone next to your hotel keycard will demagnetize it - fun!). Tonight was our free night so we 4 went walking in the chilly evening air looking at menus and getting a bit of fresh air before dinner during which I ate half a cow disguised as a cheeseburger. Tomorrow we start over with (hopefully) recharged brains.