Friday, January 9, 2004 – I took the bus down the strip last night but the place I wanted to go for desert in Excalibur was already closed so I continued down to Mandalay Bay then back up through the Luxor looking for a good desert, not finding anything interesting I continued back up the strip ending up at New York, New York again where I tried a pretty good chocolate torte. I also did some more nighttime photography before heading back and turning in for the night. I slept in this morning until 10:30 and got to CES about 11:45 starting out at the opposite end (South Hall) where most of the pro-audio and home theater stuff is housed. My legs felt much better and I quickly covered the first floor of South hall in about an hour picking up much more literature than yesterday. At one I was going to go to a HDTV roundtable, but when I got there the line was horrendous so I sat down by the TechTV booth to plan my next move when I bumped into Minnie and Vinny who had just arrived. Vinny took some photos of the TechTV employees struggling to get up the “analog chain” for crowd control and then we headed off in search of the Adobe booth. Though we eventually discovered that Adobe didn’t have a booth we did have a nifty experience that demonstrates why not to keep batteries and keys in the same pants pocket as Vinny had a AA battery in his pocket get quite hot by shorting out on his keychain. After cooling the battery we walked the central hall for a while checking out the DLP displays at the TI booth, the set-top DVD recorders in the Panasonic booth and the tablet PCs at the Toshiba booth where Minnie did some sample artwork. About five o’clock we caught the shuttle back to Vinnie’s car and drove out to Fry’s Electronics which was a fantastic experience as I have often heard the store mentioned but never experienced it. After purchasing a souvenir mouse pad we drove up to Macaroni Grill for dinner where more conversation and hilarity ensued. By the time we finished dinner it was ten o’clock so Vinny dropped me off at my hotel and we plan to meet tomorrow at the TechTV booth around eleven. About half an hour later I headed out to catch a bus downtown to the Freemont Street Experience which occurs every hour from 6pm-midnight. Most of downtown Freemont Street is only open to pedestrians and has been covered by a huge light display, every hour they turn off all the other lights downtown and do a light and sound show. The entire area felt like a shopping mall to me which was interesting considering its all outdoors. I took a number of pictures of the downtown area and had quite a bit of fun watching all the people before I returned to my hotel. I was very comfortable with the Freemont Street environment, I think even more so then the Strip, and although I can’t qualify why that is I really enjoyed the experience. I’m planning to get to the convention by 11 tomorrow so I should be off to bed.
Sounds like a great time!
Did I understand correctly that Vinnie was wearing hot pants? 😉
Thanks for pointing that out! My travel entries are written late at night in the hotel and often contain typos. I check as I can, but sometimes they still make it through.