It’s official, I have my first vacation plans for the year. Well, it’s part vacation plans, part work, but it’s going to take me coast to coast in the last week of May and the first week in June.
First up, I’ll be heading to sunny…beautiful…San Diego! This is going to be for a work conference. Now, if I’ve never told you about my work conferences, they are great ways for me to see the country on the company dime. So far, for conferences I’ve been sent to Orlando (Disney World) and multiple times to Las Vegas (adult Disney World). I’ve actually been to two separate conferences for work, both multiple times. The first is the HDI conference, which stands for Help Desk Institute. This conference usually ends up being pretty fun, relevant to my job, and usually a pretty good time.
The other is the ACORD/LOMA conference, which is typically too boring for me to care about spelling out the acronyms for you. My trip to San Diego is for this second conference, and it largely consists of my standing in my company’s booth and answering questions about what my company does to vendors who are trying to sell us stuff. I don’t enjoy this conference as much because it has a lot less to do with my actual job. So you may be asking why it is I’m going. It is because, now having now had a couple years experience with this conference, I now have a much better idea how to maximize this experience for myself. This will consist of not attending any of the conference sessions, which two years’ experience has taught me have no discernible benefit to my actual job, and merely just doing my time in the ‘B booth. This will amount to approximately 10-12 hours of my four days there. The rest of my time I intend to spend on myself. And there are some seriously huge pros that factored into my decision to go to this conference:
1) It’s in San Diego. I’ve never been to San Diego. I’ve wanted to see San Diego. And what better way to do so than on the company dime.
2) I can watch San Diego Padres games from the rooftop bar at my hotel that overlooks Petco park. Think of them as extreme bleacher seats that combine two of my favorite things: beer and drinking beer outdoors. The view looks something like this:
3) The closing night party for the conference is on board here: http://www.midway.org/. This will combine my never having been on an aircraft carrier along with the aforementioned beer and drinking beer outdoors. This equals win.
All in all, I think this negates the cons of a generally boring conference.
From San Diego, I will be flying directly to Savannah, GA and driving out to Pine Mountain, GA with the family for this: http://www.masterswaterski.com/. What better way to spend Memorial Day weekend than with the 52 annual waterskiing and wakeboarding competition. I think it will be wonderfully hokey and entertaining, and I want to see primarily two things: waterskiing pyramids and wipeouts. I aim to have both those desires satisfied.
From Pine Mountain, my parents will start their journey north, back to Norwell for the summer, and I will return to their house in South Carolina for a week of relaxing. I’ve done this vacation a couple times before in the past few years and I’ve really enjoyed it. It typically involves a lot of sitting around, some trips into Savannah, Charleston, and now Beaufort (now that I know where the bars are), grilling, cold drinks on the back porch, and a whole lot of doing nothing in particular. As in past years, I’ll invite some people down, and am hoping some folks will take me up on it.
All in all, this is going to add up to two weeks out of the office. Long enough that I will probably forget how to do my job. But that’s not such a bad thing, is it?
