Hall Family

As many of you might know, I spent the weekend of Dayna’s birthday in New Orleans helping setup for the 2009 ELCA Youth Gathering.

It was held in the New Orleans convention center and the Super Dome with something like 36,000 high school students attending.  I read somewhere it is the biggest convention to be in the city in the last 4 years.  I was a part of the commtech team (Communications and Technology), which was responsible for computers, radios, phones, streaming, etc at the Gathering.  My particular focus was on making sure the radios and phones were setup and working correctly, along with helping folks get comfortable with using them.  And I had to do all my work before the kids showed up in quantity by a day, since I didn’t stay for the whole Gathering, due to other travel plans later in the week.  Upon arriving in New Orleans and leaving the airport, my glasses immediately fogged up.  After that I was taken to our hotel to meet up with the rest of the group, who had mostly arrived the night before and had been touring the city that day.

When I saw the 11th floor lobby to the hotel, I figured the stay wouldn’t be too bad.  If I was able to get any sleep that was.  Turns out that was not as much as I hoped for, as over the 4 days I was there I got back to the room before midnight once, often closer to 1 or 2 and left by about 8 every morning.  Each day I was greeted with this out the window.

And each night I returned to find the mighty Mississippi had become this:

Off to the left you can see the first edges of the French Quarter.  I didn’t really get there much for exploring beyond meals.  One evening the group I was with ventured to find a legendary muffuletta, only to discover that Central Grocery, their origin, was closed on Sundays.  With little delay, we saw a restaurant nearby that also served that sandwich of massive proportions. (following image courtesy pink_fish13 on flickr)

On there is an olive spread, 3 or 4 types of meat and 2 types of cheese.  Somewhere between a quarter and half one is more than enough for an average meal.

Also, on the topic of eating was the visit to Mulate’s right across the street from the convention center.  There I had some tasty grilled Gator, and luckily I enjoyed the Zydeco music, since the band was loud enough for the large room and we were 10-15 feet away from them.

For a taste of the music and dancing there here is a youtube video I found.  Our table was behind one of the pillars across the dance floor.

When not eating, it was all about working, from setup in our office area:

Of which this is just the one small corner that was later enclosed to keep the video and photo people safe (or the other way around, I suppose).

Or setup in the Super Dome (mostly testing radio relays on my part):

Or looking over the massive convention floor and wondering how it would get transformed in time.

Oh, that’s the short end from the sky bridge I was standing in, here is the other direction, of which you can’t even see the far end.

Suffice it to say, the building is a half mile long.  It’s a lot of walking moving stuff around.  I guessed one day, between walking from the hotel to the convention center and to meals, I walked around 8 miles outside the building, probably 3 or 4 more inside.  I really wish I would have had a pedometer on me those days to find out.

Not everyone in the building was helpful of course, but at least they were entertaining to see.

O.K., that is a horrible shot to end this post on, but I really didn’t want to scare it with a flash, since I figured it would try to eat me or something.

After all those long days, I have to say it was a pretty fun experience, and I imagine if I had been there for the event itself it would have been even more fun.  As it was I got to help a bit with setting up some twitter post retrievals to be used on reader boards, but spent most of my time talking, or trying to talk with people, on phone or in person.  Writing twitter parsing scripts is much less draining to me.  Maybe I wouldn’t have survived a full week of it, but it would be fun to try.