The story so far…

Monday at Macworld. Typically a slow day as officially it hasn’t really started yet, but the excitement really begins to build today. MyMac is covering it all naturally with all the resources we have and you can bet that while others may spend more in covering an event like this, they won’t have the same feel as you’ll get from us. MyMac doesn’t hold back from saying what’s good, bad, or indifferent from Macworld and this year will be no different.

Tim (who already has his media pass) and John Nemo (editor extraordinaire!) will be at the keynote while us mere mortals will have to wait until tomorrow at 10AM (Pacific Time) to have our chance to be annotated by IDG to be worthy enough to enter the hallowed halls of the Moscone Center. But enough of my whining about that. Let me now whine about something entirely different. My journey to San Francisco. Before I start let me add that everything that happened, every little bit of misfortune was directly because of decisions that I made months ago so I have no one to blame but myself.

Thanks to the good folks at ProSoft Engineering and Speck product (both of whom whose products I use and enjoy) we actually had sponsors so the flights and hotel in San Francisco for Tim and I are paid for. I started looking online for flights and hotels and quickly discovered that it’s almost impossible to book two separate flight and have both people in the same hotel for any kind of discount. SO, I decided to just book us both out of the Grand Rapids airport in Michigan and then stay in the same hotel in San Francisco. This left me with the dilemma of getting to Grand Rapids, Michigan from Northern Virginia. I could fly, but frankly I avoid flights whenever I can so I decided to drive it instead. I mean it’s ONLY about 700 miles. My wife naturally thought I was crazy But a few things happened to firm up this decision. First gas prices dropped from $4.50 to about $1.75 a gallon. This really reduced my costs. Next, I just like driving long distances.

So I left Virginia at around 6 AM on Friday the 2nd of January. I probably could have done it straight through, but that would have put me at Tim’s house pretty late so there was no point in really pushing it. Got as far as Sandusky, Ohio before stopping. Got up on Saturday and leisurely drove the remaining 200 miles or so and got to Tim’s house in the early afternoon.

We left the next morning from Battle Creek and almost immediately hit freezing rain. Certainly made the 1 and 1/2 hour drive to Grand Rapids interesting. The airport was no big deal at first. We got our tickets and made our way to the gate. The flight was VERY late in arriving and we were delayed by over 1/2 hour in departing. If the flight had been straight to San Fran we wouldn’t have cared, but this leg was just to Minneapolis. Once we actually left, the flight was pretty good. We were on an Airbus A320 and the seats were comfortable. We arrived in Minnesota with only about 1/2 hour to spare. Our last (and much longer) flight was on a Boeing 757 that had just about every inch of available space with seats and the flight was fully booked. I had almost zero leg room and spent a good portion of the flight standing up. It was a miserable experience and in the future Northwest Airlines will not get my business if I can avoid it.

Once we were in San Francisco we went to the hotel and rested a bit before going over to the W Hotel near the Moscone Center to met with Don Meyar of Small Dog Electronics for a few drinks. Tim had a Tom Collins and I had two Jack Daniels and Cokes and we were both pretty shnonkered after not eating for 7 hours or so. Fortunately there’s a Denny’s nearby and we ate an early (for the west coast) dinner and headed back for the hotel. By 7:30 PM we were both exhausted and crashed. This meant we were also both wide awake by 3:30 in the morning in Saturday.

We met with Mark Rudd early and had breakfast. Later today we going to a meeting with Microsoft and then we have the MyMac meet up at 3 PM outside. This is going to be a really busy time and stay tuned to MyMac for lots of great coverage!