There was someone sitting in my seat when I got there, so I offered a trade.  It was funny as the ladies were really very friendly and I told her that I would not get up all night so she said I could sit in the window.  I would not have minded sitting in the aisle, but they insisted as she said she may get up during the night.  They were perhaps the best seatmates I’ve had in ages.

We soon pushed back and headed out in the cool night skies.  My best thing about Las Vegas is taking off at night and seeing all the lights below.  There is really nothing like it.  We took off with the Strip on the right and then making a right turn so we could see the Strip from the other end as we gained altitude on this wingleted Boeing 757-300.  I had noticed the winglets until we pushed back.  This is the first Boeing 757-300 in revenue service with winglets.

I was way tired so sleep came really quickly as I covered up with the plastic wrapped provided blanket.  A pretzel and beverage service passed through, but I was full from the barbecue at the Hilton so I declined anything.  Landing seemed to come quickly on this 4:15 flight touching down at 5:22a.  I don’t think I will make the connection flight I thought.

As I was in the back of the plane and we got to the gate at 5:30a, I missed the 5:45a which was in the other finger of Terminal C at rainy Newark airport.  The agents moved me over to the next flight, a Boeing 777-200ER at 7:45a.  I then went to find a place to take a photo of the wingleted bird which was now heading for Orlando, FL (MCO) at 7:00a.  I could not find a place though due to its gate assignment at 102.

I did however find a spot in the Presidents Club that would give me great pictures.  And so at 7:00a when it pushed back, I got a few pictures in the rainy dawn.  I also had some breakfast of cereal and mini muffins.  I left almost right after the pushback as I did not want to lose my place on this flight.

At the gate I collected my middle seat boarding pass and headed onboard.  It was freezing in the jetway, I thought these things had heat.  As I waited onboard, a guy came for the aisle seat, but no one showed for the window.  Once the doors were closed, the guy asked if he could take the window as I was about to move over.  He said he wanted to sleep; I guess I did not look sleepy.  I obliged him anyway and he was thankful.  I was psyched about having that empty seat as I believe it was the only one on the plane.

We pushed back a few minutes late and made the long trek to the runway and took off  into the rainy morning skies.  I reclined my seat and the guy behind me protested that he was tall, annoyed I un-reclined and tried to fall asleep.  Maybe I should have complained about the noise his little girl was making…The flight attendants did come by with a breakfast offering of cereal and bananas; At this point, I kind of wished the offering was a bit different, oh well.

This airplane has power at the seats which I utilized and audio/video on demand which I did not use as I could hardly keep my eyes open.  I did hear the Captain come on and say that due to the winds we would have to fly past the airport and then come back which would cause us to arrive at the gate a few minutes late.

As we descended, the guy’s daughter kept kicking my seat back and tapping it with her hands.  Her father never once told her to stop it or apologize for her behavior and I never said anything to him.  Some people can be really selfish it seems.

We landed without incident and headed to the gate arriving about five minutes behind schedule.  I then called Metro and was advised the next bus was at 10:51a, good deal I had enough time.  This was a pretty good trip.

How are you spending your weekend?

Las Vegas Convention Center

After finding the South Hall as the driver dropped me at the Hilton Hotel (they are not allowed to drop off people at the Convention Center) I picked up my registration information and was able to see Anthony Edwards and Jermaine Dupri greeting attendees at the end of the keynote .  They were two of the four keynote speakers.  I then found @sseagraves, met some new people (@chrispian and @ifroggy) and wandered around.  I was pumped!

It was interesting meeting @ifroggy as I had started to use his discount code to get the 20% saving on the registration fee, but I also had one from BlogWorld.  Thinking that I could use them both I entered the BlogWorld one and it overwrote the @ifroggy one  as you can only use one.  By then I had forgotten what the @ifroggy code was.  It made a funny icebreaker when I met him face to face.  By the way BlogWorld, I think you should have a Saturday only rate for those who canonly make it on Saturday.  Just a thought.

I talked to a guy, @remco, from the Netherlands at a booth for www.yubby.com, a new video aggregation site.  You should definitely check that out.  You can see what I did with it at http://www.yubby.com/i/cruisinaltitudecom/channel/player/8490/first. I will be playing with for a bit to see how it can showcase our videos.  He also has a site at http://www.dik.nl and he had stickers saying “I (love sign) DIK)”, freaking hilarious.  He said “dik” means “fat” in Dutch.

I also attended a travel panel with folks from an Advertising agency, Disney Parks and Fairmont hotels.  It was great to get the perspective from their end.  I learned a lot here.  Mike Taylor of Fairmont Hotels seems to have a good handle on how to use social media in the travel space.  Disney was concentrating on mom bloggers, but I think they are missing out on the other bloggers out there who can bring an audience to Disney.  The guy from the agency, Tom Martin, seemed a little harsh, you can read his thoughts on his blog.  Overall, it was a good presentation on how to get in touch with the players in the travel space.

I did two sessions on video editing, but they were both disappointing as I expected a more hands on approach as opposed to just telling me Web sites and application names.  I wanted a, here is a video and this is exactly how to get it on your site, adding tags, etc. and it works.  Don’t do this, do this type of approach.  Hopefully that will be better next year.

I unfortunately, missed the session with the top bloggers (Brian Clark [never heard of Brian before], John Chow and Darren Rowse and Zac Johnson [I'd never heard of him before today either]), but I’m hoping to find a link to it somewhere.  If you find it, please let me know.  I did get to talk with Darren after so that was good as I did sign up for his 31 Days to Blogging free e-course which was fantastic.  He knows his stuff.  I did meet John Chow too; a super nice down to earth guy. 

One of the weird things is that there were a few good sessions (titled anyways), but they occurred at the same time, so I had to pick one.  I did see recording equipment, so I’m expecting a link from BlogWorld directing me to them very soon, hint, hint…  I did get a book, “The Worst-case scenario Business Survival Guide”  from an author called Mark Joyner from Auckland, New Zealand.  As soon as I read it, I will blog about it.  It looks like a good read.

My last session was the “How to Make 60K A Month With A Membership Program?  with Timothy Sykes and Adarsh Pallian.  These guys were pretty good and did give some good pointers although Tim was like Simon from American Idol and shot down a bunch of membership site ideas.  But he is somewhat of an authority as he is quite successful at what he does.  I did wonder if the 11:30a session called “The Money Making potential of Continuity Programs” with Tim Kerber and Ryan Lee was better?  Did anyone attend that session? or BlogWorld is recorded somewhere?  Would love to have attended, but the Travel session clashed with it and being a travel blogger, I had to attend that one. 

About 15 minutes later was the final keynote with Guy Kawaskai hosting Kevin Pollak, Chad Vader (Aaron Yonda and Matt Sloan) and a very funny/raunchy female comedian of whom I’d never heard of called, The Blogess.  It was a great session with Pollak doing his famed impressions of Christoper Walken and William Shatner.  These were priceless.  The Blogess also had this funny recount of a twitter incident with William Shatner.  Pollak talked about how he makes people imitate Larry King on his online show at.  Try as he could though, he could not get @guykawasaki to do an impression to the dismay of the audience.

One insanely funny thing was that The Blogess drank white wine from a bottle given to her by @guykawasaki, then she passed it to the other three guests who drank from it too.  Then Kevin Pollak passed it to an audience member who took a swag and passed it along.  I refrained when it got to me, but that bottle made it to the back of the room to resounding cheers; that was totally awesome!  I’m not sure if this is what a closing keynote should be like, but whatever.  I did ask one guy in a nearby hotel elevator what he thought of the show and he mentioned that he hated the closing keynote as there was too much cursing from Pollak, oh well.

Oh, I did meet @crimpshoes, Qiana Markham who makes her own shoes and blog about them.  One of the bloggers, Tim Skykes, thought this was not a good idea to be a continuity model, but you be the judge, go check out her stuff.

After the keynote was wrapped, we headed to the closing barbecue party at the Hilton poolside.  Lots of food and beverages.  Oddly enough, local beer was complimentary, but anything else was paid including 4.00 USD for water.  We all though that was odd.

After a quick dinner and drinks, I bade goodbyes and headed for the taxi rank.  It was 8:22p and a taxi was the only way to ensure that I got to the airport ontime for the 9:45p to Newark connecting to the 5:45a for Houston.

I got a cab right away and enjoyed talking to the cab driver who is originally from Ethiopia.  He even slowed down to allow me to take pictures as I kept snapping away as we continued our journey.  Once at the airport, the fare read 14.70 USD, I added a 2.30 USD tip and was surprised by a 3.00 USD service fee.  Ridiculous I thought, but I had to pay it.  I did and bade goodbye and headed into the terminal.

How was your BlogWorld Experience?

Houston, TX 17 Oct. 2009

The flight was quite full and I was only able to get an aisle seat, but I was happy.  I always prefer a window seat going out there as the American topography is spectacular.  It changes from flat lands, to snow capped mountains to green pastures to desert and lakes, just fantastic.

This pleasure was bestowed upon a Brazilian guy and his friend who were in the U.S. for ten days for a conference in Las Vegas.  They had just arrived on the red eye flight from Sao Paulo, Brazil so were pretty exhausted.  We chatted for quite a bit before takeoff and during the flight though.

We pushed back ontime and then had a clear path to the runway so we were off in no time.  It is a 2:45 flight this morning and we would arrive ontime the crew advised.  Soon after takeoff, we were served cereal with a banana and non-alcoholic complimentary beverage of choice.  Alcoholic beverages were 6 USD which can be paid with cash or debit/credit cards.  Headsets were 1 USD for the animated Disney movie UP, being shown.

I had a chance to get some zees as did other passengers including the Brazilians.  These early flights are brutal!  As we flew along, the Captain did come on and pointed out cool stuff. I love it when they do that.   It was soon time for landing so we all prepared for it.  You could see the mountains and brown desert floor outside as we descended into “Sin City.”  It was 8:31a when we pulled up to the gate a few minutes late on this Boeing 737-800.

I headed for the Presidents Club which is fun to find if you’ve never visited it, where a similar breakfast as the Club in Houston and the airplane was being served.  I got online and finished registering for the event, contact @sseagraves as he was attending and then headed out taking the train into the main terminal as Continental is in Terminal D at Las Vegas-McCarran.  Sadly, I would miss the keynote address scheduled for 9:30a.

I found a waiting shuttle for 6 USD, paid and waited.  Shuttles also cost 6.50 USD or 36.00 USD for a limousine and I assumed about 20 USD for a cab.  At about 9:55a, we left for the Hilton from where I would walk over to the Las Vegas Convention Center South Hall.  I arrived there at 10:45a after dropping passengers off at Koval Resort, the Venetian, the Mirage, Treasure Island and the Riviera.  It was a good tour but I was annoyed.  I should have taken a cab.

1. Iguasu Falls, Argentina (IGR)
2. Las Vegas, NV (LAS) for Blogworld
3. London, England (LHR)

I got to the airport with plenty of time to spare as I needed to get some tickets for the journey.  Just before doing that I went up to the roof of the parking and off in the distance I saw Air Force One; yup, the President of the United States, Barack Obama was in town for a benefit.  I think this was my first time taking a photo of this majestic Boeing 747 derivative.

I entered the airport without any incident, got my tickets and then headed to the Presidents Club for eats and a drink or two. I did notice that the airplane was not at the gate and thought that was strange.  Anyway, at about 8:00p, it was disclosed that the airplane would show in about twenty minutes so we should stay seated.  Well, this soon changed to a 9:30p departure, then a the airplane should be at the gate at 9:30p and finally to a set departure time of 12:30a.

This new time meant I could not make the journey as I would not be able to connect with the intended flights from Buenos Aires’ downtown airport to Iguasu.  With that I closed the door on heading south tonight.

Option 3 was no longer available as the London flight had departed at 6:25p, so Las Vegas it is.  Except that the last flight was at 9:30p.  No worries, I’ll take the 7:35a tomorrow.  See you then.