WBPT Trip Report: Part 1 #WPBT

Holy crap. I haven't slept like that in ages. Monday night was a 9 pm lights out for me and if it was for the fact that I was behind the wheel of a car driving from the Minneapolis airport to my cozy home in southern Minnesota, it would have happened a lot earlier. Do I have any complaints? Nope. The exhaustion was worth every red line in my eyes and my complete inability to focus on any task that took more then 5 seconds.

The Blogger Winter Gathering is like no other adventure. My memories are both vivid and hazy. I'd recommend a tour through real time archives of our collective hast tag #wpbt. It was by the use of Twitter that many people were communicating for the weekend. April had a good idea and maybe we should do it next year, Twitter training. It was essential for much of the shenanigans that occurred.
Drizz and I decided to meet at MSP at around 2pm. Since we are some seriously organized chaps, this gave us time to hang out before we got on our separate flights. Wait, what's this? Oh look, our

tickets have the same flight number. Yeah, we were actually on the same flight.

No fear, food and cocktails aren't a problem at the airport. As we all know, the Winter Gathering is all about celebrating his birthday, so a birthday cap'n & coke were on my agenda...Happy birthday BTW!

As I would soon learn was gonna be typical for the weekend, our flight was delayed. A connecting flight was running behind so we needed to wait. Yawn. We did what any other upstanding Minnesota boys would do, pinball. Seems Drizz is a phenom at this. In the course of a few minutes, he'd lined up a few free games for us to kill. I killed mine quickly and with few points accumulated. He, kept the points rolling. Sigh.

This final shot from the airport is Drizz winning yet another hand of Chinese poker. I had never played it before, shock, I know. The very first hand he dealt me, I had a royal flush, but as someone twittered back to me, your royal flush is only as good as the other 8 cards....they sucked. He went on to win the first 5 hands I ever played. I suck. Need cash? Play me.

In preparation for the weekend, he also introduced me to Pai Gow, minus the casino, and the money and the complete intoxication. This too...I sucked at. Go me.

Our plane boarded almost exactly one hour late. If you ever met the two of us, you will notice that he's a few inches taller then me. He's actually a fairly tall guy...me, I'm average. Seemed only fitting I'd get the exit row and the flight attendant would use a shoe horn to squeeze the big guy in the row behind me. Gotta love fate.

Thursday night of the Winter Gathering is all about the hugs, the howdy's and the booze. There were so many people I looked forward to meeting for the first time and old friends I needed to pick up from where we left off last year. This post went on way longer then I had planned. I used to want to write about Thursday night, but frankly, I don't take notes. You really need to attend this event.

Here's what's on the agenda and these next posts I promise to organize a lot better. I played some poker, stories are plenty. If I don't write about the Pinball Hall of Fame, PirateLawyer will explode, that's coming. Steel Panther Friday night at Green Valley Ranch. Neon Graveyard. Lagasse Sports Stadium for Sunday football and random shots around town.

I've almost finished going through the 800 pictures I took. For some reason I always get hung up on getting this first post out. Some more sleep tonight and probably some more writing tomorrow. More linking to come. I'm still friggin' exhausted. I have no idea why I go back to work right away on Tuesday. Ugh.