Today was very chill. No set agenda nothing needing to be done so after a pretty good free hotel breakfast I decided I needed to get over my new found fear of driving.

I mounted my faithful steed pictured and drove to a local mall. It was *MUCH* better driving in daylight without having just flown in from DC. While it’s still a lot harder than driving at home as you need to be always concentrating it wasn’t so bad.

The mall was big but nothing special except for it contained a Legoland. Normally this would excite me a LOT but previous research found that they have a really weird policy that you must abduct a child before they will allow you in as an adult! No opportunity arose to snatch and grab a child so I stuck that one off the list.

Today marked the start of my actual holiday. I know with all the conference parties it might have looked like i was on holiday but you would be mistaken. That was all very serious work!

Today after a sleep in and MUCH less of a hang over I decided to explore. With the death of the Queen and the 1 year anniversary of mums death I felt that a trip to Arlington cemetery would be appropriate.

As indicated in yesterdays post today started off rough. After getting to sleep around 3am I woke feeling very sorry for myself just before 9. I hurried to the conference to catch the morning keynote from the FBI deputy director on the cyber landscape.

After the first session I returned back to my hotel to top up on fluids and have a nap. The map ended up being longer than planned but I did feel a lot better for it.

The afternoon keynote was GaryVee (Gary Vaynerchuk). He lived up to the hype and was very motivational. The best take away I got from him was:

• Hire fast
• Fire faster
• Promote fastest

Basically stop wasting time on your hiring process because your still going to make mistakes regardless, trust your gut and exit someone sooner rather than letting issues become the normal and drop this concept everyone has to do the slog before they get promoted. If someone is excellent they will do you more good in a role with more autonomy. 

Day 3 is the first full day of conference and the first real test of my liver. It currently midday and I have still not recovered from yesterday. It’s fair to say I am questioning my life choices right about now. I am very pleased that I brought antacids and enzyme replacements.

My Day 4 post which will cover today is expected to be pretty brief!

Ok so Day 3 started with a conference breakfast loaded with bacon, we then all filed into a massive event space where over 3000 of us sat for some very American style presentations.

My first full day in DC! I woke up really early. I waited for daylight as walking around DC in the dark is considered… stupid. It was lightly spitting so figured it was a good time for a walk.

Ok so the day started with a pretty jarring alarm. While it was set for a respectable 8.00am local time that was still 1am? For my body clock. Today is all about getting to DC from Houston.

I am currently enroute from Houston to Baltimore enjoying the inflight wifi. A short recap of the rest of Day 0 the longest day.

AKL – LA onboard ZN4. I was was fortunate to be in BP with a bed as this was an overnight flight leaving around 11pm local time arriving into LA around 4pm local time.

So today was a bit of rough one for me. Not only is it the start of a trip and all the planning and stress that goes with it, today also marks the 1 year anniversary of my Mums death.

I started the day off with a walk to Mums favorite spot to lay some flowers and mark the time of her death. 07:52.