Open Up My Eager Eyes

I just spent the last few days in Indianapolis.  And it was amazing.

I went to a conference for the business that I just started.  I left with my roommate S (who’s also in the biz and the one who got me started) on Friday morning at 5 am in our rental car.  We drove in shifts for 10 hours across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and then into Indiana.  When we got to our swanky Marriott hotel, we found our room, which we were going to share with two other girls from our business team that I hadn’t met yet.  One of the girls, D, had already arrived and was chilling out in the room when we came in and dumped our stuff off.  We sat down for a hot second before we were swooped up by the rest of our team that had all ready arrived.  All together there were 13 of us, and since the conference didn’t start until Saturday, we all went out to explore the city.  Downtown Indianapolis was really nice (and clean!) and the people were really nice too.  It seemed like a kind of small city that wasn’t too crowded, which to me was kind of the best of both worlds – city, but not tons of people all up ons!

Then we found a downtown mall, which was really cool and fun.  We all ate dinner together at Champp’s and then went to GameStop, where we played tons of arcade games and had lots of fun.  Even though I hadn’t met some of the group before, everyone was really great, and I felt so at home with them all.  After our fun, we headed back to the hotel and hung around in the lobby for a few hours, talking to each other and making friends with the other hotel guests.  The hotel was also hosting SegwayFest, so there were tons of people zipping around on segways.  We made friends with a German man who designs custom products for segways and is part of a segway polo team, and he let us take turns riding around on his segway in the lobby!  It was really cool.  When I finally couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, we wrapped up and went to bed.

Saturday we spent the majority of the day in the hotel’s massive conference room for the Syenrgy ‘08 LTD Conference, where people from the business talked and shared their experiences with the over 2500 people who came from all over the country.  It was really interesting to hear from the people who were already successfull, telling us how we could build our businesses to their level in about 5 years (for the record, “their level” is a half a million dollars a year and up, so I took careful notes).  And besides having a bit of a sore bottom at the end of the night, the day was really informative and inspiring.  That night the girls in the group came to our room, ordered pizza, and had a little impromptu dance party, which was super fun, even at 3 in the morning.

On Sunday, there was the option of going to church, but D and I passed and instead decided to explore the city a little bit more.  We took a self-guided tour of the State Capitol Building, which was around the block from our hotel.  It was a really nice building from the outside, so we wandered around for a while trying to find the visitors entrance, which led us into the basement of the building.  From the look of the basement though, we didn’t hold out much hope for the rest of the place.  But boy, were we wrong.

And since there was literally no one in the building after the security checkpoint, we decided to have a little fun.

It was pretty awesome.  Then we went back to the GameStop arcade, since D still had tons of points left on her arcade card.  We played some Dance Dance Revolution, which I surprisingly kicked ass at, and some Alpine Race snowboarding action before it was time to head back to the conference.  We spent the afternoon listening to more speakers, and me taking furious notes.  This part of the conference was so amazingly informative and mind blowing that I was just so incredibly pumped up to be there and be a part of it all.  It was actually life changing.  When it was over, our group went out one last time to the mall food court, where we had some grub, talked a little more, then wandered off to our respective cars to head home.  S and I took turns driving back again overnight, which was considerably more difficult than driving in the morning.  Trying to stay awake-wise, that is.  We got back this morning at 5:30, when I slept till noon.

All weekend I was extremely exhausted, and had an extremely amazing time.  Indianapolis is a lovely city, and I really liked being there.  And I’m incredibly excited to be starting in my new business, and I know that I’m going to be working with a fabulous group of people and I’m going to have so much fun!