Call me kooky

So the PPAI show, the expo…. Guess I’ll start from the begining.

I overpacked. Like I always do. This becomes something of a problem because undoubtably this makes my travel bag topheavy. Topheavy makes it impossible to use the wheels sine they’re tool close together. Part of the topheavyness is from my boots, but boy am I glad I brought them along

Being terribly behind like I usualy am I don’t finish packing untill the morning we leave. This is nothing unusual and I’ve gotten pretty good at not forgetting stuff when I do this.

We rush off to the airport, muddle through security and get out to the terminal. Now we can have breakfast. Turns out the resturants in the airport run thier whole menu the whole time. Since I’m blind and mother is mother we ended up ordering lunch items. It’s food, it’s good, and a total pain to eat in seatac’s shitty waiting chairs.

Now I’m pretty sure I’ve flown before this trip. I have vague memories that could be anything but are somehow associated with flying. I was…. not happy with flying. Of course, I was sick. That’s how it always go. “whooo! vacation! AND I’M SICK.” The pressure changes didn’t play well with my sinuses and it was too hot. It was also rough, lots of turbulance on the way down.

(Some side notes: The plane on the way down rocked a lot while on the runway. Strangest thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Mom thinks it might have been the wind but you’d figure one would need a lot of wind to rock a plane that much. I also generaly despise being crammed in small places with strangers, planes are pretty good at doing just this. Also, I can’t read while in a moving vehicle so two hours of staring at the roof….wheeeee. Mildy suprised at how quickly they applied full power on take off too, didn’t help the sinuses at all.)

The best part of the flight down was being able to look out the window as we approached Las Vegas. I’m not a pilot, and I don’t know shit about the las vegas airport but it seemed like the pilot was doing a lot of correcting on the way in. Watching the strip, out there, rise up from the bleak landscape was cool though.

The difference in airport design is amazing. Whereas seatac is obviously an old airport the main las vegas airport is obviously new. Oddly enough the las vegas airport has a huge problem with keeping things on time. I kept hearing things about the busy airspace so the airport design might have nothing to do with it.

The hotel pretty much sucked, it was survivable but they were trying to keep the whole medevial theme with shitty lighting and dark decor. You also can’t get anywhere without walking through the smoky casino, which is by design, but still pisses me off.

The room itself wasn’t bad but NO HISTORY CHANNEL! UGH! Why stay in a hotel if there’s not history channel?
We then went over to get our badges for the expo proper. Allllllllllllllllllllll……….llllll the way over there. The mandalay bay and about six other hotels form this huge complex that’s about six blocks long. If you walk in a straight line. Which we of course didn’t. The sign in process was pretty cool. You have a print out with a barcode on it. They scan this barcode and print out your badge with all the revelant information on it. Turns out the lanyards were stuck in denver thanks to the snow so we pinned the badges to our shirts.

Some mucking and wandering about and it was time for dinner. For the record the convention center is fucking huge. I mean really fucking huge. We caught the shuttle bus back to our hotel (yeah, woulda been nice to know of those one the way out.). We ended up going to the buffet at the excaliber which wasn’t that fantastic really. Lots of food though.
With the first round piled high on our plates we find a place to sit and I head for the bathroom. When I get back from the bathroom I go to move my badge out of the way, and it’s not there. First day and I manage to lose my badge. Fuck.

I looked around the buffet but couldn’t find the badge, I even asked at the front desk. No luck, fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Turns out it was pretty easy to get a replacement badge, but still it sucked a lot to lose my badge at the first convention on the first day.

I’m going to skip a lot of stuff here. I might fill it in later but this is already a terribly long ass post and I haven’t gotten to the pictures!

The show proper was very huge. If you’ve ever seen the big boeing hangers you’re in the ballpark, but with two stories. We’re talking freaking big. This is where the boots came in, and the press a print tote bags, which kick total ass and were worth the money.

Sumerizing and cutting corners a lot… So much to see, shirts…. fuck, everything was there. Even colman! I didn’t grab half as many samples as I had intended, I was too fucking tired thanks to the whole being sick bit. But I still managed to grab a bunch of doodads. Dad, much to my suprise, really tore things up and nearly covered all of the first floor himself.

The second day we had a nice talk with…. shit, can’t remember his name, at the buzzline booth. These are the guys that do a lot of the supplies for disney’s parade of lights vendors. All the glowy lighed things you can buy from the carts at disney these guys make. Turns out they were out of the cool light up lanyards (they went through nearly the whole stock of 5000 the first day) but we got a cool laser/flashlight pen and a pen with LEDS that change color. Awesome.

One of the cut corners is the press a print events. They tried to stuff well over 700 people into the hard rock cafe. It was pretty terrible so me and mom caught a taxi back early.

Now pictures!

The hard rock propane heater and a good example of how poorly the cell phone camera handles low light.

The press a print breakfast. A fruit cup, a grain bar, a less than great scone thing and Mt. Dew. Oh, and a fancy box.

The new products pavilion sneak peak for Press a Print. Notice all the orange shirts, through out the show people were commenting on the orange shirts. I think PAP actually outnumbered the PPAI shirts. And another example of how unspectacular the cell camera can be.

The trip back was pretty uneventfull…. except for the fact there’s no 1030AM flight out of vegas on Alaska. There’s a 1030PM flight though, as we found out at around 912AM when we tried to check in. Whoops. Turns out this is a fairly common problem with the alaska Eticket thing. One of the clerks at the counter told us about the bitchfest they had on christmas day as people found out there wasn’t a flight at 1030pm and they were packed they couldn’t get anyone on standby. We ended up on a 1200 flight so we didn’t do too bad at all.

Time to wrap this long post up, call me kooky,

Phosphers