That Pam Chick

As I mentioned in my post about the great time we had at IM Spring Break, before heading home we hit the road and headed a bit further down to Miami, FL – home of Subliminal Pixels, IM Spring Break attendee.  The next day we turned around and headed back towards SoCal by taking the scenic route on the A1A (Beachfront Avenue!) where we saw some of the most ridiculously big houses and yachts that I have ever seen in my life.  In one day, we drove all the way from Miami to New Orleans so we would be able to spend 2 nights there.  We stayed in the French Quarter and enjoyed some Hurricanes and other adult beverages on Bourbon Street. On our second night in NOLA we met up with Chris Hedgecock and Jorge Gonzales who were also doing a road trip to promote Cars for a Grand.

We then headed off to San Antonio, TX which is one of my favorite cities in the country.  We stayed near the Riverwalk and took a boat tour down the Riverwalk and had lunch before hitting the road for the long drive through west Texas.  The next two days were pretty much just a blur as we just drove as much as possible to get home by Friday the 10th making our trip a full 2 week journey.

We’ve been home now for just over a month and are back to our normal lives.  I already miss the road trip snacks like Slim Jims, Skittles, chips and Blue Smoke Homemade Salsa so I am looking forward to our next road trip.  Although I don’t know how we will top this one!

We arrived in Ft. Lauderdale, FL on April 1st for IM Spring Break, put on by the IM Broadcast crew who have the best conferences at the best prices.  I wasn’t speaking until the last day so we were able to relax and enjoy the great networking, food and fun for a few days.

CK and I both played in the poker tournament with the other Spring Break attendees.  There was a bounty on Neil Patel’s head so whoever knocked him out would win about $120, if I remember correctly.  I, of course, had had a few drinks and decided to shove the money down my shirt for safe keeping.  I had all but lost when Aaron Chronister decided he was bored with playing and left his chips to me, making me the chip leader.  Even with more than double the chips than most people had, I still managed not to win.  When we were down to the final four players we just decided to chop the pot and go back to socializing by the pool.

We got to spend time with Los Angeles Chiropractor Michael Dorausch, keynote speaker Chris Winfield of search and social media marketing company 10e20, and Paul Macnamara as well as many other talented, influential, entertaining and awesome people.

The rest of the conference was excellent as expected with amazing speakers, including NDA sessions giving the actual attendees a leg up over those who were watching tweets and blog posts about the conference, great food and an open bar every night.  I was on the IM Business panel with two of my favorite people in the industry – Chris Hart of Bruce Clay, Inc. and Tony Adam from the Yahoo! Audience Marketing Group.  The details of my presentation are available in my IM Spring Break Client Management Presentation post.  It’s a good read in my opinion but Tony out did us all by bringing beers in for our audience members!

IM Spring Break ended with a bang and the next day we hit to road to Miami.  We spent a night in Miami where we met up with some of CK’s friends from college, had some great Cuban food and put our feet in the water to officially say we went from coast to coast.  We got up the next morning and hit the road for our week long trip back to San Diego which I’ll recap in the next post.

On March 27th, 2009 Kid Disco and I embarked on a 2 week drive across the country and back that most called crazy and a select few called awesome.  We left San Diego at 6:30 AM on March 27th and drove to Mesa, AZ.

In Mesa, we were able to see the Cubs vs. White Sox in a pre-season game at Hohokam Park.  The Cubs spanked the Sox in front of a sold out crowd!! After the game we met up with Brian LaFrance and Chase Granberry of AuthorityLabs.com for dinner at Bison Witches off Mill Avenue. We grabbed a few drinks after dinner and turned in early since we were planning on driving as far as possible the next day.

We spent the next two days driving from Arizona to Austin, TX with a stop to sleep in the middle of nowhere.  In Austin we met up with some friends, including Kate Morris, for dinner with Drinks at The Continental Club after where CK, Elvis and I had a nice Eiffel Tower moment.  We decided to spend another day in Austin to see more of the area. Kate told us about Lady Bird Lake which has a great jogging path so we were able to get in a run to burn off some of our road trip snacks!

That night for dinner we negated any benefit from our run by going to one of my favorite places in Texas, The County Line, where we had all you can eat BBQ.  And we did eat all we could before they rolled us out of there.

After Austin we were on a mission to drive as much as possible each day to get to IM Spring Break in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.  We drove through five states that day to get to Tallahassee, FL where we spent the night before driving the rest of the way to Ft. Lauderdale.  We got settled in to our hotel at IM Spring Break and started the Spring Break festivities.

We’d like to thank a few of our sponsors for sponsoring the first part of our road trip: Los Angeles SEO Company RankLab Interactive, Internet Marketing Firm Primary Affect, MatterMidia and the Twitter white & yellow pages TweetFind. More to follow in my IM Spring Break Recap and IM Road Trip Recap Part Deux!