I was at the MVP Summit in Seattle last week. It was my first summit and just like I expected, I ended up having great time. Aside from reconnecting with many friends, I made a few more. As always, the biggest challenge was getting up at 6:30 to make the first session after hanging out late into the night. It was kinda cool seeing Bill Gates live, even though he is a bit dry as a speaker. I like the guy, that’s why I am willing to forgive him that he mentioned MS Access and not SQL Server as his favorite product. On the other hand, I was quite happy to hear that many SQL heads “like” SharePoint just as much as I do.
But then the nightmare began for me. I was supposed to fly home on Thursday night. In the afternoon Delta left me a voicemail and told me that my flight was cancelled and that I was rescheduled for Saturday. After being on hold for an hour my cell phone died so I decided to go to the airport, and that’s where I found out about airport closures on East Coast. I ended up getting a cheap hotel near the airport for two nights where for a lack of other things to do, I caught up on sleep. This actually turned out to be a good (and much needed) thing for me later on. On Saturday I made it to Atlanta and when I was about to board my plane to Burlington, they told me that the plane was too heavy to board anymore passengers. The most frustrating thing was when they told me I was bumped off on first come, first served basis so remember this lesson – board your plane as early as you can. After waiting at the ticket counter for 2 hours, I was told that the next available flight to Burlington was on Thursday the 22nd. They offered other options, like flying to Montreal in 4 days, or flying to Detroit(!) on Wednesday. It seemed that all I could do was to show up at the airport every day and hope I would get on a flight with a standby ticket. The most annoying thing was that Delta wasn’t even willing to pay for a hotel, even though it was obvious that they overloaded the plane with luggage.
So at that point after adding up the cost of 4 more unpaid days plus a hotel, I decided to rent a car and drive home. I booked a car from Hertz for $430, they made me do a two day minimum one way rental since it’s such a distance. I waited in another line for 30 minutes trying to get my luggage, only to be told that I would have to wait at least 3 hours if I was lucky. So I finally left the airport at midnight and I can say, it was very liberating to be finally in charge of my destiny. The drive went really well, thank God for that extra sleep in Seattle because I was able to drive without any breaks, aside from getting gas and junk food. 19 hours later at 7PM on Sunday I was finally home, only to be greeted by 3 feet of snow in my driveway. The girls were very happy to have me back…
Since I recently switched jobs, I pretty much had to finance this trip myself and take unpaid time off work. This travel nightmare added about $1,000 to the total cost, things like the hotel in Seattle, cabs, car rental, gas from Atlanta to Vermont and all the tolls along the way. Would I still have gone to the MVP Summit if I had known this was gonna happen? You bet!