My Inbound 2012 / Boston Experience

So I did the post of select quotes from my first business trip, but I never really said how it went.  For those of you who may not know, last week work sent me to Boston for a few days for the Inbound 2012 marketing conference.  It was a 3 day event where I got to meet a ton of other marketing people, attend some workshops about how to improve my company’s marketing efforts, and see Cyndi Lauper sing the blues (she’s quite good, actually).

My first flight left on Monday afternoon and took me to DC where I was supposed to have a short layover.  I got to see the Washington Monument from the sky when we landed which was absolutely amazing!  Sadly I was so flabbergasted by it that I didn’t think to take a photo.  We got in about 15 minutes late and I was kind of concerned about missing my next flight.

               

Aside: I urge you to keep in mind that this was only the second time I had ever flown in my life and the first time I’d ever done so alone.  I was pretty nervous about the whole thing honestly.

Luckily for me, my next flight ended up being about two hours late.  No but really, two hours.  That’s not the best part though, the kicker was that they literally had us change gates six times.  We went back and forth between gates 38 and 44 six times!  It was moderately absurd.

I did eventually get to Boston though.  For the first two days I basically stayed in the hotel / conference center.  The second day I met a girl who was about my age and ended up getting dinner with her, it was great because I didn’t have to be that awkward kid eating alone out at a restaurant. Win!  What was most interesting though was that she talked even faster than I do (which is pretty impressive, honestly).

My third night in town I got to explore with a friend of mine who lives in Boston.  I didn’t have time to see much, but I did get to walk through the public gardens and see the statue of Paul Revere and the iconic swan boats.  We also got to go get a super meal (work paid for mine, more winning) and walk around the area.

The trip home was not quite so traumatic, although there was an irate older guy getting off of a plane in Philadelphia, like seriously, like he was yelling at people and refused to calm down, it was insane.  All in all it was a good first trip of my adult / working life.