Here we are!

the day started very nicely. the first people i ran into, when i was loading the car, were the nice folks from New Hampshire who insisted on giving me the cool alien in a spaceship finger puppet they had on their dash!

we had breakfast with Jen of Blue Smiley fame and Jen's Mom.

somewhere along the way from sweetwater today we picked up folks from amarillo and houston-- quite a few, actually, including a mellow yellow vert and a pink chromaflair. The Talleys were part of the group-- Karen and Cameron. We all had lunch at the Dairy Queen, then a "fast group" set out and we chose to stick with the "slow group". Finally tooled into Roswell around 4pm.

Headed up to the conf center to do some setup and ran into our old buddy russ who is now a vendor-- mohawk motorsports. he looks to be the biggest vendor there this year.

We made registration late and missed almost everyone except of course Howie, and Shelley Keys who we had missed very badly on the caravan-- she had to ride with Central this year.

We found Cet and got some crucial info from him, ran back up to the conference center to finish setup, and Cet magically appeared with his iBook, which in all the stress over leaving my wireless hub at home, I had forgotten I also needed to borrow. So he definitely showed up in the right place at the right time! Helped me get everything setup just right along with Steph and David.

I'll just mention again that Cet rocks.

David also came up with a much nicer way for me to setup the cam within the conference center. Whoo! So expect some nice shots, especially of the awards.

The folks from New Hapshire-- Michael, and we think Karen, told us they'd found a completely new hotel right across the street to stay at-- they were the very first customers! We decided to and switch there as the place we were staying was pretty far away. We're quite pleased with the change.

Unloaded the car and immediately headed out to the skywatch party where we ran into Teresa Hartz right away, and gave her the Cheerwine she'd requested from NC.

At the skywatch we also hung out with Susan Hester, Robb and Jeremy from Dallas, Terri of Smylz II fame, and of course Tina Ward of Tina Ward fame :)

Robb said that his brother, who works at Toyota as a power train engineer, is completely fascinated with the web cams, and has the whole engineering department out there distracted with them. So a big shout out to the guys at Toyota :)

We did spacepod proud with lots of good glow stuff and ran the web cam during the glow, though we were not able to run it live. Those pics are uploading now and will be available from the slideshow.

In the parking lot we tried to get closeups on the cams of folks before they de-glowed. Some REALLY nice shots there-- i'll eventually get em up in the favorite pics.

A beautiful Platinum with nice rims parked next to me; I got to talking with the driver and it turns out he's from South Carolina! He was totally amazed to find a North Carolinian there too.

Steve from Boston FINALLY gave us rides in his convertible with the top down, and all I can say is DROOOOLLLLL! If i ever buy spacepod a little sister, she WILL be a "top down car" (as my little brothers used to say).

We also met a fellow named Jacob from Oklahoma who had had his bug retrofitted with heated seats and leather-- very nice. He also had quite a beard, which he later read a poem about.

Finally we headed out to the car wash around 11pm, gave spacepod a fairly quick wash and vaccum, applied some of the decals i'd been meaning to apply, and headed back to the hotel just as cet, bj, and ollie pulled in.

Hey, it's only 1am-- and I'm about ready for bed. Here's hoping things go well with the cams tomorrow!

Posted by lisa at June 21, 2003 02:57 AM