Travel

The good part about the Hilton in Chicago is that it has nice marble floors. The bad part is this place has Internet that costs $35 for 5 hours of use, and then when you buy it, it doesn’t work anyway, so in reality this hotel has “Internet” that doesn’t work for a cost that works out to $168 per day. And by “not work”, I mean it actually doesn’t work (for about 3 days now).

The weird part of the Hilton is the 5th floor… Somehow Vanessa Fox ended up on the 5th floor (not really sure how that happened) and said it was weird. So of course we (Randfish, Jen, Shoemoney’s sister [hah] and myself) had to go (the elevators don’t go to the 5th floor, so we had to take the stairs)… and yes, it was indeed weird and semi-abandoned (all the lights where on, and room doors were open, but the rooms were kind of tore up). Some others (I wasn’t involved in this) went up there and found out that the mini-bars were all stocked and unlocked, so I guess for some people that’s a good thing about the Hilton (free snacks and alcohol).

Either way, all the good and weird stuff isn’t enough to outweigh the fact that this stupid hotel doesn’t have Internet that works.

That is the route I took to get home from Pubcon in Las Vegas. It was a very odd route by the airline. Got on a plane in Vegas that was a direct flight to San Diego (and supposed to get to San Diego at 1:05 am this morning). Circled around San Diego for about 30 minutes, then we flew (and landed in) Phoenix, Arizona (another state), that way I could catch an 8:30 am flight to San Diego from Phoenix. Fun!

(too much fog in San Diego to land)

Update 2

I spliced together the two actual route maps that Brian posted in a comment. A very odd route to get from Las Vegas to Phoenix… “Oh, let’s go check out San Diego before we go to Arizona…” heh

Yahoo Publisher Network hosted the best party at Pubcon (at least of the ones I went to). They threw it in the Hugh Hefner Sky Villa at the Palms (it’s a 9,000 square foot, $40,000/night “room”) on Wednesday night.

Microsoft threw a party in the Kingpin Suite Thursday night, but I decided that going to see Borat and playing poker afterwards would be more fun than hanging out with Microsoft people (I’m sure they are nice people and all, I just don’t perceive Microsoft people as a barrel of monkey fun).

…yet I’m going there today for Pubcon. Joy. They should do shows in places like Hawaii or Tahiti IMO.

(6th time I’ve been to Vegas this year unfortunately)

Okay, we are back in San Jose now since our flight home leaves in the morning. Scott’s friend Tracy is currently staying in San Jose on a student exchange program, so we got a couple taxis over to the party.

As you can see from he picture, it was a wild and crazy time. They even had Spanish karaoke and salsa dancing!

Scott, Jessica and I decided to hike around the base of the Arenal volcano this afternoon. It was pouring like a mother BTW.

Tabacón resort is pretty nice and we’ll be staying here for 2 nights. Lots to do and a really neat maze of hot springs fed by the Arenal volcano.

Too bad their tech guys don’t know anything about computers or the Internet. One guy actually came to my room, and looked at my laptop for about 20 minutes before he said, “Oh, is this a Macintosh? These don’t work with the Internet.” In reality it was a problem with their authentication servers (which I knew from the beginning).

Avoid this crappy town like the plague. We drove through it on our way to Playa Hermosa, and someone came up and stabbed our tire while we were sitting in the car.

As Julien would say, “Thank you very much! We really appreciate it!” (you have to smile and wave to get the full effect).

We made it to our first (real) destination in Costa Rica!!! We found a hotel (Costa Verde) and headed to the beach. 2 for 1 beers and mixed drinks! Yay!

Okay, so there was that terrorist thing going on today, so the airports were all whacked out… or at least they were supposed to be. Everyone at SES was like, “Dude, you only have 4 hours before your flight, and the airport is an hour away, you better leave now… Actually, you probably aren’t going to make your flight as it is, so we’ll see you back here in a few hours I guess.”

So I get to the airport with 3 hours before my flight… what happens? Uhm, I wait for the ONE person in the security line to go through before me, so it takes about 2 minutes to get through the security screening. Rad, now I’m at the airport with 3 hours to kill.

I think it might have been a plot cobbled together by Jen, Dave, DaveN, Danny and Vanessa to ditch me so they could go to the bar. Fuckers. “Oh yeah… let’s send Shawn to the airport, it will be funny.”

The whole liquid thing is stupid anyway since they allow some liquids. On the plane I was on, some lady was allowed to bring on a giant bottle of water for her dog. If you are a terrorist, wouldn’t you just keep the liquid on your person, and maybe not tell them you have it since they don’t have to send it through the x-ray machine?