Week TWO In Which I Have Made It To Vegas.

Yes folks, Adam is in Las Vegas Nevada, at the umpteenth Consumer Electronics Association of America’s International CES, or consumer electronics show. (Hashtag #InternationalCES) Once again, to my utter delight, I am a guest of the CEA themselves, as a ‘Scholarship Journalist’, which means I am a guest of the organizers’ themselves. I am deeply honoured.
However, last year, when I went via The Alamo (NEVER Forget The Alamo..) I flew US Air and they were wonderful. I had brief layovers, just long enough to recover, recompress and get back on a plane refreshed to carry on. Just like making a stop on the motorway.
Trouble is, I left it a bit late versus what I aughta have done to request my flights and my route into the USA was Miami. Trouble is, they had had 800 flights land there that day and the broken chain in the gate walkway system where we landed, meant an hour and a half, sat on the Tarmac, after a ten hour flight.
The nice lady on the plane said there would be ‘˜people outside’ to help those with connecting flights. That was hogwash. I found my bag in a scrum of offloaded stuff near the carousel but not before becoming certain that it was not there, of course. I go to queue to get a verdict.. but an airline dude appears and leads a few of us off, too fast for my aching legs to keep up, to route march us to another counter in another place in the airport where in fact the wait was just as long. It just added to the pain.
Then, when I finally got to a counter, the lady there issued me with a $12 and a $7 dinner and breakfast voucher and told me there ‘was no hotel space in Miami’. Another whopper, it was just that they had a deal with MIA airport hotel and it was chockablock.
I was told to ‘Go wait in the auditorium, where we will make hotel room announcements’. Another whopper. I was feeling ill by then and wandered off to try to find if there was ANY way to get a bed. It turned out that there was a place with a freephone to OTHER hotels. But I was not told. Kinda lie-by-omission. I was not in a good way when I got back to this ‘˜auditorium’, which is a space with room for two hundred chairs. Staff appeared and apologetically laid out military camp cot beds and supplied skinny airline blankets and pillows and a crate or two of water.
Under four blankets, with a disgusting and ignored ‘˜chicken tenders’ meal congealing next to me, I managed maybe three hours in total, fitfully losing consciousness rather than sleeping. At five AM, I staggered to the desk and after a fat slice of shitty stress while I found out I WAS on the standby flight, I flew to LV Nevada to land on Sunday morning.
Don’t ask me how, but I managed to make it to the CES Unveiled event at the Mandalay Bay hotel that same day and got some good material. (as well as some colossal prawns!) And now, I am off to go get a lot of stuff for your delectation. I am not going word-heavy this year. Rather, I shall hose everything down with my new (second hand) Canon EOS D7 (or is that 7D? er Nikon/Canon joke) Mark ONE. The Mark II is out and being publicised here at CES so as to get some rich annotated galleries together, and I shall make a LOT of short CES TATV clips, which I will embed into stories with only enough words to stick the fruitcake together. So wish me luck I am going in!
Singing off, hardly over-excited at all.
Adam Rayner On Line Editor