Jacksonville, part 2

We sat on that couch in the lobby for hours. I never really did sleep out there, but I wasn't fully aware of the time passing either. At one point, I was stretched out on the couch with my feet in Jason's lap. I hear him call my name and I open my eyes, and there is my friend Michelle! She came with her husband Jonathan and she lives in South Carolina. She and I met last year at the conference and I just adore her. She had a bilateral mastectomy in October and so when I jumped up to give her a hug, I was very gentle. It was great to see her there. As the morning went on, I would recognize more people as they came through and would give a shout out to them.

Finally we got our room around 11am. We dragged our sorry rear ends up to our room and collapsed. We literally dropped our bags on the ground, got our clothes off and fell into bed within 5 minutes of being in the room. We slept good and hard for about 2.5 hours before waking up. I'm already blanking out on the first class we had, I believe it was on research advocacy. I guess it was good. Most of the classes were really lame. They were giving us information we already had! So the good news was that we had really researched information out when we all found out we had breast cancer. The bad thing was, was that we were all really bored.

Jason and I actually didn't go to the first class. We got up and walked out onto the riverfront and walked to Jacksonville Landing. It was a small outdoor mall of sorts about 4 blocks away. It was really humid compared to Portland. Hard to get used to at first. We wandered all over and ate there before finally going back and getting our nametags and bags. They let us in the exhibitor's hall and we got to check everything out. We now have our supply of pens, pads of paper, and candies for the year. lol Some of the booths had some great information, others definitely did not. But it was nice to see everything.