Arrived at Collaborate’06, Nashville

I've arrived at the Collaborate'06 hotel now and it's about a quarter to seven in the morning. I flew in to Nashville around 4 o'clock yesterday and got down to the venue, about an hour later. You can tell I was from the UK as I was the only person wearing a coat and sweater (it's about 80º here in the afternoon and everyone else on the flight was in t-shirts and shorts), but the journey wasn't too bad as the flight was all in daylight hours and they're only six hours behind the UK here.

I thought I'd resist the temptation to write a blog entry just after I got here, as it's always a bit strange when you first get somewhere and you've been travelling through timezones for most of the day. I'm glad I did actually as it all seemed a bit bizarre when I got here, but given a good night's sleep it all seems to make a bit more sense. The conference venue, the Gaylord Opryland Hotel & Resort, is a kind of "super-hotel and resort" with about 2000+ rooms and five distinct zones all under a glass canopy - apparently it's the biggest hotel in the world all under one roof.

When you pull up to the hotel it just seems massive - a sort of cross between a huge shopping mall like Bluewater and Ceausescu's House of the People, but you have to get inside and have a wander around to get a feel for the scale of the place. It's basically a complete holiday resort, with fountain, rivers (and river boats), twenty restaurants and so on all under cover. I guess the strange thing is the fact that it's all under glass - the weather's beautiful and it's a blue sky but it's all under cover.

Once you get over the shock of it all - again to use my analogies (bear in mind I'd not had much sleep at this point) it reminded me of a cross between Westworld, Silent Running and Butlins. Anyway, here's a few more photos to give you an idea of what it's like (note to anyone from my team who's reading this - there's a discounted room rate for conference attendees, and to my wife Janet - I didn't know it was going to be this opulent, honest). It's also a nice touch to be over here in a nice hotel - when I've got to Open World in San Francisco in the past, it's always been on a flight and hotel deal, and the hotels have always been a bit crummy. This place is a bit of a palace actually, very well done and the sort of thing you'd only find in America.

Anyway, it's about 7.30 in the morning now and I'm going to venture out and see if I can get some breakfast (and tea, hopefully). So far the only person from the UK I've bumped in to is James Haslam from the UKOUG, I think Peter Robson is also over here and a couple of other people that I know. I'm off to the first session soon, probably going to drop into Don Burleson's Predictive Modelling session - given all the goings on last year I'm interested to see what Don and Mike are proposing. I'll probably stay in there for the morning, and I've also said I'll pop into Michael Armstrong-Smith's Discoverer 10g Relational session at the end to take part in the Q&A.

Until then though, and I ask this question warily - just what is "The Grand Ole Opry"? As someone who's more likely to be listening to Kraftwerk and dutch trance, it all looks rather scary to me - I'll have to get a mullet and take a look (or as they say, "business in front, party at the back".)