Blog Ryan

Wow! What an adventure. I just got settled after a two week trip where I combined Pubcon Las Vegas with a trip to visit my folks for Thanksgiving. Deciding to combine a family vacation with a business trip definitely complicates things, but it was a great trip.

We packed all five of my little family into the pickup truck along and pointed the truck south for a long drive. We crossed over the Canadian Rockies through Jasper and Banff in the middle of a pretty significant snowstorm with little incident. Thank goodness for DVD players in vehicles or the kids would have went crazy. We crawled along at about 25 miles an hour for about a 4 hour stretch of that drive. I dropped my wife and kids off at my parents, hitched a ride with Williams and headed for Vegas.

The conference was great, I’ll follow up on some of my personal favorites here shortly. I enjoyed a great stay at the Treasure Island where the rooms exceeded my expectations. It was no Wynn Las Vegas, but really–what is.

The next week I enjoyed a great Thanksgiving dinner with my family, caught up with some old friends and all in all had a great trip.

My wife owns a home decorating store so she shopped like crazy for some new merchandise. So much that we rented a U-Haul trailer and packed it as full as we could and turned around to come home. Having already tried the Canadian Rockies and found them difficult to pass at this time of year, we decided to go up through Seattle and come home a different route. A flat tire on the U-Haul, an extra ten hours on the road than usual and tired kids and more ice and snow packed roads I pulled into the house at about 10:00 last night. We unloaded the truck and trailer and got back to freezing Canadian temperatures (-29C or -20F). The water pipes were frozen and our other car won’t start. I got the last of the pipes unthawed at about 6:30 this morning.

Now its back to work. Tons to implement from Pubcon (my favorite conference in this industry) and even more to follow up on to research.