A married rural Dude at Blogher….
Not my photo, click it to see this dude's gallery nice shots!
Little outta my element. I’ll admit it. Not just at Blogher, but in this big damned city. As we were landing, the stinking street lights stretched off into the horizon. Oh, this year’s blogher is in Chicago. It’s been a treat.
The wife and I had a few problems right off of jump street. Southwest Airlines has a policy of over-booking their flights by 20 percent. We arrived, without confirmed tickets or boarding passes, went to get them and found out that we were that lucky 20 percent! Ugh …
There were three of us, my wife and I and some morose looking redheaded girl, who, upon receiving the news that her flight was screwed up broken into tears. Thank god my wife has a sense of grace about her.
The way this works is Southwest put us on another flight, we landed six hours late and had to transfer in Vegas ($9 for a whopper at the Vegas Airport Burgerking, I mean really…) and Southwest gave us just over $600 in flight “vouchers” for future travel. Got a year to use em. The wife said we should fly to Detroit and buy a car and drive it back… Are cars still dirt cheap in Detroit?
So that sucked. Learning to use public transit (I’m rural remember) at 1 am was also a treat. There is no concealed carry in Illinois. So there wasn’t a change of them reciprocating Washington’s Concealed Carry License so I have that hanging over my head. (In Chicago only the bad guys and Law Enforcement have the right to defend themselves) and I’m on a train with my dearest sweet wife at 1 am.
The train ride was, however, without incidient. Met a nice young man who helped us out a bit (Don’t change over at Evergreen, it’s sorta…blaughhh there, wait until Lake and Clark), nice guy, was getting ready for a Magic: The Gathering tournament, so I knew he was alright, he was sorting through his cards on the train. We made it to the hotel close to 2, showered and dropped dead in bed for the night.
I got my bright neon green bracelet this morning, after my wife got her Blogher pass (I’m a Lobbycon-er) and she took me on a walking tour of the expo floor.
Lots of vendors displaying all sorts of cool woman blogging stuff. Didn’t mean I was assed out though. Everyone was polite with me, and handled me like the primitive screw head I was. Some of the memorable vendors were the All Laundry Fairies where hilarious, Pik-Nik (a very very cool photo site to edit photos in a slick and simple browser app), Springpadit.com, which is a personal organization website that allows you to share with your family lists, todo’s, calendars and what have you and it is also handy for storing recipes, keeping tabs on budgets and todo’s, AND allowances! check it out, I ain’t getting a kickback here, I think it’s nifty and hopefully the make a wordpress add on so I can integrate it with my blog, Nikon was there showing off their digital cameras, and many others.
I am impressed with my wife’s choice of hotels. We couldn’t afford to stay in the hotel where the convention is at, so she did some research and got us a room for three nights at about $90 a night at the Seneca Hotel which is just under a mile away from the Sheraton where the conference is taking place. A mile sounds like a lot, but it’s not bad, we were running late and it was 6$ cab ride away, and really it’s not hard walking, I’ve done it five times today, plus wandered around the Magnificent Mile a bit. I’m going to wander out a bit later with my camera and see what I can see. I’ll be sure to post some images after I get my film back.
Yeah that’s right baby, FILM just like in the olden days!
I had a great time, I’m so glad the Seneca worked out. After that shifty desk clerk, I was a little scared that we would be getting a $1000 bill.
Saving my pennies so we can go next year too. I’m only about 150,000 pennies away.
[...] 2009 was a year. Lots of things happened we didn’t plan on. The wife and I went to blogher with my wife, very awesome. Got to see me a big damned city (Chicago), didn’t take as many [...]