Road Trip to Orlando Summit

Richard beat me to posting about the Orlando Summit. We had more than twice an many people show up as the last time we had an event like this in Orlando. All of the sessions I attended were well done. Tim Paris and Eric Bright did great presentations. I need to mention this because they are reseller engineers, and I like to recognize the good ones when I run into them, because we certainly run into enough not-so-good ones. Ken, the group leader from Daytona, did a very interesting presentation on using databases to drive design tables. Casey Gorman did the sheet metal presentation, and I understand he’s going to get to take that show on the road to southern California. Great job, guys! I like seeing these presentations. I always learn stuff.

There were several presentations I didn’t get to see. That’s the one downside of these events, that you can only see half the presentations. But if you bring two people from your company, you can compare notes.

Richard let me present again, this year my topic was The Care And Feeding Of Multi-bodies In SolidWorks. You can download it here if you want to (~46 MB). I think it was one of my better presentations. I have a tendency to sometimes get too involved in minutia, and sometimes wander into the possibly irrelevant or academic. I tried to avoid that this time. I never annotate presentations, sorry about that. All of the narrative is usually spontaneous. Annotating always takes me 4 times longer than writing the thing in the first place.

Anyway, one of the occasional features of this blog is a Road Trip entry a few times a year. I think this trip was deserving of an entry, even though the trip itself is irrelevant to the content of the Technical Summit. Kim drove down with me, and then Monday morning hopped a flight from Orlando back to Roanoke. There is this thing about people and work that I haven’t figured out yet.

The story really begins in Wilmington, NC. Since Richard already spilled the beans that there is a new “Matt-Mobile” (rhymes with Bat Mobile, although Kim may contest the name), the car figures into the story prominently, because most of the point of the trip, aside from going to the Orlando SWUGN Technical Summit, was to drive the convertible along the coast, something I’ve always wanted to do. So here’s a picture of the car.It’s a 2005 Nissan 350Z convertible, I got it used, so I didn’t pay full boat for it. When you get a car like this, even people like me who are obviously not vain about their looks become vain about the way the car looks. So of course after a good dusting of early spring pollen, I had to wash it.

After getting to the beach in Wilmington, NC, we took a ferry from Ft Fisher to Southport.

We were really lucky, being the last ones onto the ferry, arriving just as it was about to leave. We were also the first ones off, so we didn’t have to poke along at the end of the line of cars. This section of North Carolina was very beautiful and quaint. Very nice place.

From there we took 17 to Myrtle Beach. I had never been to Myrtle before. My first impression of it was kind of rough. The north end of the beach is just a commercial nightmare. We spent the night in a nice hotel which just happened to have a cheerleader’s convention or something going on. Now I know what you’re thinking, but these were the 8-12 year old cheerleaders, not the college girls on spring break. The lobby of the hotel was a gauntlet that you had to run through without getting sparkles or frayed tassles on you. If you could get in an elevator that someone hadn’t pushed all the buttons on, you were lucky. Nice hotel, crummy neighbors.

The next stop was a sculpture garden that had a lot to see. The first thing we saw was a matching set of Viper and Vette, and tickling our vanity, we wanted to park the Z next to them, but it was blue instead of red, had a Z in it instead of a V, and didn’t cost nearly as much as the Viper anyway, so we moved respectfully down the lot.

Of course there was real sculpture there too.

Even audience participation sculpture.

You don’t always have to be serious about art, and this seemed like a good time to say so. Really, it was worth stopping for. We were possibly a couple of weeks early, later in the spring the flowers would have been spactacular. The daffodils were just about done, and some azaleas were out, even some irises.

This had to be the strangest sculpture in the whole place.

This is a turtle reaching under the feathers of a duck to “goose” the duck. Huh.

Next stop, Charleston, SC.

Great bridge. The USS Yorktown, an early aircraft carrier was there, along with the South Carolina Aquarium, which was closed. South Carolina is probably an underrated state. Most people think of the Confederate flag, Myrtle Beach, or spanish moss growing on old live oak trees, but South Carolina is a hub for R&D for new automotive technology, alternate energy development, and many other high tech fields. It is also the home of Maurice’s BBQ, which I have to say is my favorite thing about the state. You can get a great bbq dinner, sweet tea, and an education on the civil war while you’re at it.

From there, we hopped back out to I-95. We wanted to see Savannah, because it is portrayed so beautifully in the movie Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. But, as luck would have it, we were there on St. Patrick’s day, and they have a huge St. Patrick’s celebration in Savannah. We wound up staying just south of town in Richmond Hill. That night was just after the tornado hit downtown Atlanta, and the same string of storms went past our hotel. We could see the clouds in the distance exploding with constant lightning, but above us we could still see stars. It was very spooky. We lost power for a couple of hours and counted ourselves lucky to have steered south of Savannah.

We got off of I-95 just south of Jacksonville.

nA1A is a beautiful drive. Lots of big expensive houses on the beach. Lots of them for sale too, if you’re interested. St. Augustine looked like a nice place, but it was very crowded, and being a bit crowd-phobic, we moved on to what’s next. The strip of road between St. Augustine and Daytona was really beautiful for cruising in a convertible on a sunny, breezy day.

Daytona, at least along the strip, I found to be a more civilized place than the unbridled commercialism of Myrtle Beach. I expected Daytona to be cheesy, but it was quite nice. We did catch a few spring breakers there, but they weren’t yet taking over.

We also got a nice dinner in Daytona, but check out what we found in the parking lot:

At one time that was a PT Cruiser.

What a trip! The rest of the trip is a story for a different time. We really enjoyed the couple of early spring days along the coast.