[Adventure in Atanta…and then Wichita continued]. We eventually get to our hotel in Atlanta…in the hood. Maybe it was the three inches of protective glass for the cashier at the mini-mart (where we bought contact solution for Mike) or just the general mood, but the neighborhood just didn’t feel like the safest of places. We walked to a McDonald’s for dinner where we did get to catch the end of the VP debate. (Who knew that a McD’s in the hood would have such a nice flat screen mounted in the corner…and that it would be tuned into CNN?! Excellent!). After our excellent dining experience, we headed back to our hotel, where a dude approached us and said to Mike, “Hey man, do you know where I can find the liquor store?”

Knowing that we’d be up at the Seattle equivalent of 3am, we hit the hay early. I woke up at Atlanta 2am to Mike asking me what I was doing. Hmmm. I was in the hotel room bathroom attempting to make coffee…at 2am…we didn’t need to be up until 6am. I was just so very confused!! At any rate, we successfully managed to get ourselves up at 6 (our 3), caught our shuttle back to the airport, used our $14 food vouchers to buy gourmet croissanwiches at Burger King – ooh la la!, and then finally, finally got our plane to Wichita.

Once we had, at long last, arrived at the Hyatt in Wichita, we were tired and stinky and SO ready to party with our EE pEEps at the Convention. We had an amazing time – as always – with this group of people. The Convention was fantastic but made even more so by the quality time we got to spend with our friends there.

Saturday night at the EE Conventions is the time you get to let your hair down and party. After a day full of (very worthwhile) keynote speakers and workshops, everyone is ready for some fun. Thus, enters my new, ginormous laptop bag; now, known to many as the booze bag. A few people decided that spending $9-11/glass of wine just wasn’t going to cut it, so they had made the trek to a liquor store stocking up on behalf of the greater good. The question then became how we would smuggle these bottles of wine down to the Convention banquet. I casually mentioned that I had a quite-good-sized laptop bag. It was as if she had been created for the soul purpose of carrying contraband liquor. With three different zippered sections New Bag easily fit quite a few, good-sized bottles within her good-sized compartments.

Everything went splendidly until we’d left one of our bottles sitting on the table during dinner. It happened to be right in front of Mike who happened to be the one person at our table not partaking in the wine. Hotel Guy comes up and says, “Excuse me, sir. You can’t have that wine here.” Mike just sits there for a second and then says, “Oh, well, it’s not mine.” Great. He throws us under the bus! Then everyone is looking at me, so I say, “Oh! Do you need us to take it back up to our room?” (I’m thinking if I’m super nice, I won’t get in too much trouble). Hotel Guy says, “That’d be great, but you know, we can just put it over on the bar for now.” Um, OK. Bob, at our table wonders if we can go help ourselves to our wine then. Yeah, doubtful.

So, instead Bob starts a bootlegged, contraband liquor business under the table, out of my pretty New Bag. All sorts of jokes were made about the filled glasses of wine that emerged from, essentially, between his legs. You can imagine – things like: the fruit of his loins, etc. While I did enjoy the fruits of his labor, all I could say was, “You guys better not get me busted! I was never even sent to the principal’s office!”