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| Photos by Rhi & I |
Lesson One: Start early. A pre-after conference party at your beautiful motel’s stylish bar is a good start. Especially if the after work crowd has already dispersed and you have the entire place to yourself. Sure, you might have to wait for them to get more ice, but it will be worth it. Enjoy the time with friends.
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| Photos by Leigh & Rah |
Lesson Two: Bloggers you like during the day are EVEN BETTER at night. The best part about the after party {once we got there, about an hour late for the 7pm start} was that it offered much more opportunity to meet bloggers you know of and hang out more. Most of my major conversations of the weekend were at the after party.
I especially enjoyed meeting this pair {left in image}. Rah and Leigh had me in stiches over and over again. It was Rah’s Super Man leap into the couch that instigated the planking. So much fun. they managed to talk their roomie into coming too and I’m glad they did. Liz is a sweet heart. With a capital S.
But then again, so were Toushka, Fiona, Lauren who is even taller than me and had on the MOST gorgeous dress and her sister Tatum. Tatum is the blogger in the green jacket at the conference! Hello stylish family. And conference organiser extraordinaire Lynda, who insisted on calling me Suger with an E.
Glow was alright too, I suppose. HA. Do you think it was weird I never really caught her first name over the noise? {through the drunken HAZE!}. Anyway. Bloggers are awesome. I met so many more, collected a few business cards {I found one in my boot the next morning!} and forgot a lot of names. I know there were more. I feel terrible. If this list have had you in it, tell me off below.
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| Photo by Leigh |
Lesson Three: The fancy the toilets, the cooler the venue. And as demonstrated by the planking photos, this loo was lovely. Bench seating, extreme hand basins {as demonstrated so effectively by Rah & I} and plenty of stalls for the entire crowd that traipse up the stairs together to get to and from them.
All in all the venue was amazing. Soooo perfect. Large with room for the tables, for dancing, for mingling and for grouping together to do shots. Essential. the ever changing lit background made for some awesome photos too. Not that I’d bought my camera.
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| Photos from Leigh & Rah |
Lesson Four: When in doubt, invent your own cocktail. As demonstrated here by Dan mingling with the bar guys can only be a good thing. Half red lemonade and half champagne, Nuffnang should thank Dan for the stretching out of the bar tab {and the drunken behavior of their guest thanks to the half drinks}. Proudly labelled the hello cocktail these babies kept many of us partying happily all night.
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| Photo by Rah‘s camera |
Lesson Five: Say hello, meet as many people as you can. At first {even with a few cocktails under my belt} I stuck with the bloggers I knew. but then I decided to go further a field and met some pretty cool ones that I’d never read their blogs before {or that often}. And the further a field I went, the more fun I had.
I laughed REALLY hard at the idea of a blog titled Drunk Post dot com {dot AU apparently as someone already owns drunk post dot com}. The proudly announced to all that I was invited to guest post. I especially enjoyed regaling others with tales of the earlier planking incident. The people I’d met and the awesome bar back at our motel. Which we’d been promised would reopen for us at whatever time {we had 24 hour room service}.
Soon it was all over. We could tell because the fluorescent lighting came back on! We jumped in a maxi cab at the Hilton and whisked our way back to our accommodation. Danimezza and Caitlin wanted to party on. Dan didn’t look as sure. Rhi was NOT interested. Me, I was secretly a little from column A and a little from column B. In the end a shift change decided it for us. We were off to our room. No dead animal bar for us.
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| photos by me |
Lesson Six: Sometimes the after, after party is pretty darn good too. Returning back to our motel, though they had promised the new guy wouldn’t reopen the bar, I put some cokes on the room {$5 each for mini cokes! Woah} and up we went. Our tiny room was even tinier with five of us in it. My bed was looking particularly tiny with a hello owl in it. And she looked like she was getting pretty darn comfy.
So we booted Dan & Dani out. Got changed into our comfy clothes, ordered some hot chips and aioli and ordered a movie. Hall pass. NOT worth it. Chips, TOTALLY worth it! We ordered a second bowl. The movie played up so it got refunded to us, but we watched it anyway. Ate our chips, drank our coke and laughed at our evening.
Lesson Seven: Morning’s after the night before kinda suck. Having a great breakfast and company helps. Going to the airport and walking fifty million blocks, does not. But THAT is a story for another day.
Suger 
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