A room with a view

bozz(83)

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A week or two ago at the end of October, the organization that I am part of had their annual conference in the northern part of Michigan's lower peninsula. It's not the first time I have written a post about this place, but this year it was a little extra special. Somehow, I lucked out and they gave me a room on the 11th floor of the hotel. The tower at Grand Traverse Resort actually has about 17 floors, but as you can see, the view from the 11th isn't that bad.

Much better than past years to be sure, if you go back and look at my posts from this area on @worldmappin, you will see that other years I have been so low I only get a view of the adjacent roof. Other times, I'm on the other side and you only see a parking lot. Then other years, it has been so cold and rainy, that you really don't get to see much of anything no matter how high you are in the tower.

However, this year was absolutely perfect. The weather was amazing, I had some magnificent views of the Grand Traverse Bay, and the room was absolutely exceptional.

I mean, even the bathroom had a view! Can you believe that? Sitting there doing your business and having a view like that? If you look in the mirror you can see the shower, which honestly is big enough to fit about ten people if you are into that sort of thing. Or attractive, which I am neither so...

Unfortunately, @iikrypticsii was stuck down on the 3rd floor and he didn't have quite as nice a view as I did. Which isn't such a big deal, because other years I have been stuck on a lower floor and he has had a nicer room than me. It all evens out you know.

On our way up, we drove into Traverse City a bit and we stopped at a local Mexican restaurant that was well known for their street tacos. It was called Taqueria TC Latino Dos and the food was pretty amazing. Probably not the best tacos I have ever had, but at $2.75 a piece for them, it wasn't a bad deal. My tech got two of the carne asada tacos, and I got a carne asada, a carnitas, and a pastor. Like I said, they were pretty good, but I think they either keep the meat in the same cooler as their seafood or they had just made some seafood tacos on the same flat top because there was a bit of a fishy flavor to my tacos.

Which isn't a huge deal for me since I don't mind fish, but if my wife had been there, it would have been a non starter for her. Like I said though, they were less than $3 a piece, so no big deal.

The conference itself lasted about two full days between Wednesday afternoon and Friday morning. I went to some really good sessions and I made some good connections with some vendors. As you might imagine, a lot of the sessions at the conference this year had to do with AI. I also attended sessions about the Zabbix free endpoint monitoring solution, Open Source software tools, IP address planning, and a bunch of other stuff.

As you can imagine though, it was hard to sit in little rooms like this when I knew I had that view back in my hotel room.

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If I were more irresponsible, I likely would have just spent the whole time in my hotel room sitting and drinking beer and watching the world go by. I still can't get over just how amazing the weather and the views were. Actually, the biggest regret I have is that @mrsbozz wasn't there to share it with me. Instead, she was back at home working hard everyday trying to fix the youth of the world.

Of course, I could always whisk her away some weekend on my own dime and try to sweet talking them into giving me an equally amazing room, but that's not really the point of this post...

Thursday night, @iikrypticsii and I got a really special treat when one of our vendors invited us to a really nice dinner at the steak house on the 16th floor of the hotel called Aerie. The menu is pretty limited, but since it was on their dime, nothing was off the table. I went ahead and got the 8 oz filet which came with the grilled asparagus and some horseradish mashed potatoes that were pretty amazing.

I started it off with a nice bourbon on the rocks from Jefferson's Ocean. They put the barrels on a ship and the salt air along with the rocking motion of the vessel gives it an interesting finish.

To finish the dinner off, I got the malted chocolate mousse. It was all pretty fantastic. The company that hosted us did this both nights of the conference, and for each group I think they had about 24 guests they invited. I have to imagine the total bill had to be something like $5000 for them across the two nights.

Needless to say, I hope we get invited again next year!

I forgot to mention, the room had a small balcony too. Like I told someone else, I was half tempted to roll the office chair out onto the balcony and just sit there. I tried to keep the sliding door open for a bit, but that high at the end of October, it ended up getting pretty chilly in the room, so I kept it closed most of the time.

I've been to this conference pretty much every year for the last twenty years or so, but this year was extra special. As I get closer to retirement, I know I don't have as many of these things ahead of me, so it was really nice to have this experience.