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Microsoft Student Insider Training Day 1: Travel

Greetings everybody!

Sorry for my recent absence from the blog.  Between my trip to Microsoft that I am about to tell you about, finals, my grandmother's cancer and a few other things, my life has been all kinds of crazy lately.  Hopefully, starting today, I can get back to blogging regularly like I vowed at the first of the year.  Anyway, lets talk my trip to Microsoft!

Since technically, the first day of the trip was the travel day, I will talk about the travel day in this post and then the extra exciting stuff will start in the next post.  As of right now, I expect to do a series of at least 4 posts about this trip which will likely have a few other posts sprinkled in and some major news about the Global Geek News Podcast to wrap everything up before we get back to your regularly scheduled blog.  Anyway, lets talk the travel day!

Wednesday morning I woke up far earlier than should be allowable by law to make sure I made it to the airport in Colorado Springs with plenty of time to go through the theater that is the TSA and wait at my gate for a couple of hours.  Normally the only part of this that I would hate would be the TSA experience but having a bad case of the runs did not make things pleasant.  Luckily, I had probably the easiest experience with the TSA that I have ever had.  I did have to remove my Kindle from my bag but that was to be expected since they have had issues seeing through it before.  Apparently listening to the TSA's guide on how to pack your bag that is posted on their site is quite helpful if you want to have an easy time getting through their checkpoint.  The flights from Colorado Springs to Denver and from Denver to Seattle were nice flights but I was rather annoyed that there was no TV in the headrests of the planes which has always been the case on every Frontier flight I have flown in the past.  I am still rather irritated about this but now I know to be a bit more picky about what planes I fly on.  Other than this, the only scary part of the flight was when we were over Seattle, getting close to landing when suddenly we hit a bad pocket of air or something and the plane went 45 degrees to the left and then 45 degrees to the right before we leveled back out.  I am sure we had a decent drop in altitude with it as well.

After the flight, it took me longer than expected to meet up with my driver that was supposed to pick me up and go to the hotel.  After waiting around for a while with no sign of anybody holding a Microsoft Student Insider sign, I finally received a call from the driver wondering where I was and where to meet me.  Turns out, he was apparently on the other end of the baggage claim area that was no short distance away, but luckily we met in the middle and headed to the car.  At this point, I had the pleasure of meeting up with two of the other insiders, Tom Ziegmann (Twitter) and Joe Osborne (Twitter), a couple of great guys that I felt right at home with.

After a decent drive to the hotel which was the Mariot hotel in the Redmond Town Center, we checked in to our rooms and received a backpack full of goodies like an MSDN cup and some spending money for food and whatever else on our travel days.  We then decided to kill some time and go walking around the Redmond Town Center to see what the area had to offer.  I was quite impressed with how nice the area was and just what kind of stores where there.  They had all kinds of restaurants, and stores ranging from a board game store to a Victoria's Secret.  Yes, there was even a Starbucks.  After walking around for a while, we decided to go our separate ways for the night.  I went and had dinner with a couple of my cousins at a restaurant in the town center while they went into Seattle to have dinner at Anthony's.  My food was good, but I think they got to eat a lot better than I did that night.

After that, I went to the board game store with my cousins and then called it a night.  Having woken up at 4:30am that morning, I was quite tired.  That was the end of the travel day and the best was yet to come.  Check back tomorrow for day 2, my first day at Microsoft!

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