As I said in the last blog post, RootsTech cannot last forever. On Sunday evening, me and @HistoryLady2013 looked out of the window of our boudoir in Hotel Monaco and noticed, with sadness, that the huge RootsTech signage in the central tower of the Salt Palace Convention Center had gone. Moving onward to the next convention, I guess.
With two days of ‘downtime’ before heading back to the UK, we decided (not for the first time) to attend the social hour in our hotel lobby at 5pm (sadly, minus our Canadian and Australian friends who had previously accompanied us during the week). Several members of the US Air Force had checked in first thing and proceeded to build a stunning Jenga tower which kept us greatly amused.
Anyone connected with either of us on Facebook will know that we have a penchant for Red Rock Brewing Company and so we paid a final visit (for this trip at least) for our evening meal before heading back to the hotel to continue our family history research. You can’t take the research gene out of either of these ladies!
Monday saw a slightly more focussed trip to the Family History Library. On Wednesday, I had managed to take a few document copies for a friend (Kitcher surname study) back in the UK but most of the time, we had people joining us to catch up/pick our brains, which slightly distracted from the task at hand! For the first time in a long while, I took the opportunity to work on my own surname study whilst @GeniAus was working on her Curry surname study alongside me. I soon had my focussed taken with a work-related matter in the name of Smith and made surprisingly light work of it! Hurrah!!
Knowing that our Valentine’s Day would be an odd one – mostly travelling – we stayed up as late as physically possible, having packed our suitcases with all our RootsTech goodies, ready for departure at 7am from the hotel. We hadn’t planned to leave so early but, when we found out that our seats were to be ‘allocated at the departure gate’ for our Salt Lake City to Detroit leg of our home journey, we decided to err on the side of caution.
We needn’t have worried. Our Express Shuttle driver arrived promptly, we were deposited at the airport swiftly and cleared the check-in desk at break-neck speed. @HistoryLady2013 was not to be calmed until she had her seat, however…. And so, we hot-footed it to D13 to enquire about our seating arrangements. We were not informed until 8:35am that we had in fact been (allegedly) upgraded and were just one row behind Business Class. Slightly confusing when Business Class is Row 1 to 4 and we were in 10!
Salt Lake to Detroit – done. We had plumped for a longer wait in Detroit to avoid any issues with connections but again, needn’t have worried (though we were quite glad we had factored this time in when we heard the horror stories of other people’s journeys to and from RootsTech). A few snaps both during our wait and on departure …. with only 53 people on our flight! We were also informed that the San Francisco flight back to Heathrow had only 30 people on board! The cabin crew could not have been more attentive….
And so, back to Blighty. You are reading this which means we have landed and are back on our merry way to FWL Towers. Some kind of ‘normal’ will now resume.
[N.B. Forgot to mention in early blogs that in fact our Express Shuttle driver back to the airport last year, Leon, was so taken with our stories of RootsTech 2016 that he and his wife, Ann, attended this year. The power of networking!!]
