RootsTech 2020 – Arrival Day

This will be a quick report as I’ve been awake since 4 a.m. Eastern and it’s now 10 p.m. back on the East Coast!

Cheryl and I started our RootsTech adventure by spending the night at the Bradley Airport hotel. Very wise, considering we had to board the plane the next morning at 5:50. Not so smart was staying up until 12:30 a.m. gabbing. I’m sure the two “Slippery Boards” I drank had nothing to do with that. (In my defense, the first one had very Chambord in it.)

Our flight was uneventful. I spent some of it working on the rewrite of my story for the familyhistorywritingchallenge but when I inadvertently hit “restart” on my computer, I knew it was time to stop.

We arrived Salt Lake City 35 minutes early. Thanks, Southwest Airlines, which gave us plenty of time to get to the Radisson Hotel and have some lunch.

After fortifying ourselves, we headed out to the Salt Palace to pick up our lanyard and bag. Our badges had already been mailed to us – great system, RootsTech! The backpack is pretty handy, too.

The big adventure of the day was taking a bus tour to the Great Salt Lake, Cheryl has been wanting to see this for a couple years. We booked a tour with City Sights. Our guide, Valerie, aka the Captain, was very informative and quite a character. Considering it is winter and too cold to actually swim in the lake, I thought she did a pretty good job of entertaining us. Did you know the Utah state bird is the California Sea Gull?

We returned to the hotel for dinner. I was thrilled to chat a few minutes with Thomas MacEntee and Lisa Alzo, easily the two people who have influenced my genealogy education the most.

We invited two ladies who each would have been sitting alone to join us for dinner. That’s one of the best things about RootsTech – the opportunity to meet new folks and learn new stuff. I never knew there was a group called the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Oh —the food was pretty good, too! I forgot to take pics, but here’s what I ate: Creamy tomato bisque, sweet potato puffs with aioli sauce, and chicken satay. If that seems like a lot of food, it was! But I wanted to taste it all! And I did share the sweet potato bites with the table.

After a quick dip in the hot tub Cheryl and I settled in for the night. We have a busy day tomorrow!!!!