Woodward Dream Cruise, August 17-20 2011

We first attended the Woodward Dream Cruise in 2001, we were in town for business, and only coincidental it was for the weekend of the cruise.  It was one of the most amazing events we’d ever attended.  We parked somewhere in Royal Oak, in one of the neighborhoods and everyone had lawn parties going on, lawn chairs setup, and it was obvious that the Motor City Culture was part of the social makeup of the area.  It was at this moment, I first had an inkling that I could live in Michigan.

In the following years, we made sure to schedule work in Michigan to coincide with the cruise, so we did make it back in 2002.  It was then we learned that it is nearly impossible to meet up with friends at the cruise.  You just can’t get to each other.  At least not before the friend you are trying to meet up with is so intoxicated he can’t text you back any more.

We were scheduled to be there in 2003, but that was the year of the big blackout.  We were traveling in the Bluebird, and I called the airline from a rest area on the Klamath River in California, I asked if they would be able to get us to Detroit, and the voice on the other end said they could get me as far as Salt Lake City.  Not very helpful.  We rescheduled our flight until they figured out how to run the airport during a blackout.

We made it, but not in time for the cruise.  We did have our hands full a while after we arrived.  Our client was still up, and doing fine until some nitwit let a customer plug their laptop into their network, infecting us the same way the power company was infected.   (Oh, by the way, the media desperately wants you to believe the outage was some sort of ridiculous cascade failure, but the guys at Microsoft and Cisco that were talking to me with one phone, were talking to the utility companies with the other phone.)  Microsoft later did a whitepaper on us eradicating the virus from our system but that is another story.  Funny thing though–I was using my smartphone to log in to my head end router to change route tables four years before Steve Jobs “Invented the Smartphone.”

So we did miss 2003, dubbed “Woodward Unplugged” but in 2004 Sara became a full time employee of our client and we moved to Michigan, and haven’t missed another one.  These photos from 2011 were my first cruise shots with the D700, and do have room for improvement, but I still enjoy looking back at them.

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