Good Morning Baltimore!
This week I went to Baltimore for the 2007 Annual NACADA Conference (National Academic Advising Association) with Sarah. These are usually pretty good conferences and this year was no exception. With my new job along with the committee assignments I've been given, I had new advising topics to focus on when choosing which presentations I would attend. For the most part my choices were pretty good; I did try to avoid the many, many sessions about the uses/dangers/whatever about Facebook but one session that was supposed to be about online tools in general was all-Facebook-all-the-time - oh well.
Here are some pics of Sarah along the way to Baltimore:
Is your camera ON?
In the cab
We arrived at our hotel, the Hyatt Regency, about 3:30pm on Thu Oct 18, checked in, took our luggage to our rooms then met up downstairs to go check in at the conference. My room smelled super-funky but I figured it was just a strange air freshener to go along with the ginger-infused toiletry items. After we got our conference materials, Sarah was tired of me talking about how "ass-tastic" my room smelled (seriously, it was just "ass-ty" if you ask me), so she agreed to come take a whiff and offer her opinion. Apparently the evil spirits inhabiting the room got busy in the few minutes I had been gone because it took serious effort for me to even go in (Sarah would not get NEAR the room because of the smell). I told a member of the housekeeping staff on the hall that the room smelled of vomit, and she only offered to "spray some more," so Sarah and I were instantly on our way to the front desk to get me another room (and suggest finding a priest for an exorcism). When we had checked in to the hotel, not even an hour earlier, they told us how full they were, but, amazingly (and to their credit) they didn't even blink and handed me new keycards to a room across the hall.
This was the ass-tastic vomit-smelling room...
I've no idea how I managed to stand there that long without getting sick.
The nice perk to the sudden room change was that I was upgraded to a Harbor-view room with a king bed:
and a cool bathroom:
Sarah's uncle who lives in D.C. came up to meet her for dinner and my sister, Charlotte Anne, came up from D.C. (2 hours to drive 38 miles!) as well to see me. My pal Todd from California joined Charlotte Anne and me for a walk around the harbor before the NACADA Keynote. After the speech we grabbed dinner and had a great time at the Irish pub (well, what passes for one) on the harbor.