Its taken me a bit longer than I really wanted to get around to blogging about the awesome Jump in Camp which I attended recently but here is the first of a few blog posts!
The Jump in Camp was organised by Microsoft and ran from November 15th-19th 2010. It was to be held in Redmond (Seattle) which as most people know is where the head office of Microsoft is situated.
Day 1 started off at a very early time for me at 6am when my alarm clock went off and I stumbled downstairs to make myself some coffee. Once alertness had been restored it was time to check I had all the important things that I would need to take with me to Seattle. Passport, Money and Macbook Pro were all present and accounted for, so off I headed on my trek across London to get to London Heathrow Airport where I was due to meet up with Harald before our 9hrs 50 min flight.
After going through the usual security and checkin procedures it was time to relax and wait for Harald to arrive on his flight from Germany. It all seemed so simple until mother nature intervened and Harald’s flight was delayed due to fog at Heathrow earlier in the day. For a while it looked like he might just make it but it wasn’t meant to be so flight BA49 left LHR on its 7,726 km without him.
The flight itself was long and fairly uneventful apart from the person sitting on the other side of the Aisle asking me how to fix various problems with his own Macbook, it seems even faking being asleep didn’t slow down the barrage of question like “What is a Megabyte” and “How to I make the screen brighter”. Eventually he ran out of questions so I was left alone to peruse the online entertainment and pray for the flight to land already.
Finally it was all over and the plane set itself down a Sea-Tac airport and we were allowed to dis-embark and head towards passport control which I was expecting to be a stressful experience. In the end it went fairly smoothly and after giving up my finger prints and a photo I was granted access to the US of A.
The next challenge was to find the Shuttle to the hotel, after spending some time going round in circles I bumped into Sam de Freyssinet and it seems with our combined brain power and some asking for directions we finally found the shuttle along with the rest of the group (Kevin Marvin, Jason Coward and Nate Abele) who would be travelling to the hotel with us.
Upon arrival at Willows Lodge I was pretty impressed (The real thing was better than the photo’s) I would have to say its possibly the nicest hotel I have ever stayed in! Once I’d dropped off my bags it was time to catchup with some friends I’d made at the previous Jump in Camp Juozas, Josh Holmes and Ashay Chaudhary
By now I had been awake for more hours than I could manage to count at the time so there was only one thing on my mind… BEER! and it seems it was all organized for us to visit the Redhook Woodinville Brewery so off we went!
After some good food and a tour of the brewery (I didn’t spray everyone with beer this time round) it was time for sleep and to try and adjust to the timezone difference which wasn’t working in my favor!
It seems Microsoft didn’t listen to my feedback on the previous camp and had booked breakfast from 7.30 – 8.30am, I had no idea how I was going to make it up that early.
Details of Day 2 coming soon.