Early Morning

The alarm clock goes off at 4:30 AM Tuesday morning.  There I am, for a moment wondering what must have caught on fire for me to be awake at that terrible hour. but then I realized I had to be at Park Central Surgical Center at 5:45 AM in order for my son to have surgery!  After several hours there (everything went perfectly btw) it was time to go home and get ready to head to the airport.

Getting There

My flight to Dulles was scheduled to depart at 4:15pm and touch down around 8:15pm, where I would be picked up by Enterprise and delivered to my rental car.  I usually like to get to the airport a couple hours before take off, just to be sure I don't have any issues parking, getting through security, etc.  So, around 2pm I roll through security with no issues (small blessings right?) and start waiting.  And waiting.  Apparently mother nature didn't like the plan, and proceeded to bring the pain on DFW. 

I think somewhere around 200 flights were cancelled Tuesday night, luckily mine was not one of them.  My flight was just delayed from taking off until around 7:40pm, placing me on the tarmac at Dulles around 11pmish.  By the time I got my bag, and found the place where Enterprise was supposed to pick me up it was near Midnight.  I waited and watched the Avis, Dollar, Alamo, National, Hertz, and Thrifty shuttles come and go over and over...for about an hour.  It was then when I started realizing Enterprise wasn't really coming.  Just as a last ditch effort I tried calling them...ALL of them!  World Wide numbers, local numbers, road side assistance even! and I never could actually talk to a human.  

I decided to just go ahead and get a cab to the hotel, it was a good 30 minute drive but I was tired and all of the other rental car companies were sold out anyways.  So, lucky me I pulled the short straw and got the nice young Ethiopian taxi driver who was either drunk or very tired.  And we embarked on a "thrill ride" swerving across lanes, speeding up to 80mph then dropping down to 50mph at no predictable interval.  I wonder if he realized that I wasn't really interested in where he came from, but the only things I could try to talk to him about (to keep him awake!) was about Ethiopia  (their form of currency is called a Birr, did you know that?)  :|

Luckily, I made it here in one piece.  Got a little bit of sleep.  And made it to the key note speech only a few minutes late. 

Thanks to Todd Sharp for giving me a ride to the conference!!!

It Was Worth It

Yes, it was worth the trouble getting here.  Afterall, that is just something that can happen when you travel and after today's sessions (Wednesday) and getting to meet a few of the people I email with/read their blog/etc it has been a great experience.   

Get to the Good Stuff

I have some notes that I took during my sessions today, and since its way too late to be first (thanks to Todd and Matt W.) :) I will do some summary posts for each day.