I have been waiting for this trip for awhile.  This is my first trip to France, my first trip to Europe and the adventure is just getting started.  I left for Cannes, France on Friday to attend VMworld Europe 2009. The first leg of my journey got me from Orlando to Charlotte, North Carolina for a two hour layover.  Next stop Munich, Germany which took just over eight hours. I learned on the flight that Munich was getting some snow and I was very glad this was not going to delay the trip.  Once in Munich I went through customs and got my passport stamped and then had to go through airport security.  I did not think I was going to need to go through security again and forgot about my full water bottle which they promptly confiscated.  Water was gone but what was really interesting was I did not have to take my shoes off when going through security.  I now had another two hours to kill before catching my connecting flight to Nice.  The flight to Nice just took a little over an hour and we went over the Alps.  This was absolutely amazing to see with some of the tops of the mountains poking through the clouds below the plane. Finally touched down in Nice and then caught a bus for the 40 minute ride to Cannes.

Once in Cannes I checked into my hotel, the Majestic Barriere and was amazed at the view from my window.  There is a little area to step outside facing the ocean.  I can see the VMworld site from my window and a great view of the area.  I stayed awake that day to try to get my body adjusted to the new time zone.  I felt pretty good when I went to bed around 11:00 p.m. or so.  When I woke up my clock said 9:30 a.m. and thought wow that was not so bad. I sent out a tweet on Twitter to see if anyone was up for breakfast and the response I got was “Dude, Breakfast?  The day is half over.” It seems I did not change the time zone on the clock and as it turned out it was 3:30 p.m.  Okay maybe the adjustment was a little harder than I expected.

I got some food and explored the town waiting for the first event to start.  Veeam was holding their customer and partner party on the “Free Life” yacht.  I want to give a shout out to the Veeam folks, they gave me a VIP pass to the party and really throw a great event.  I got to meet up with a lot of the European bloggers and see some faces of people that I usually only see once a year at VMworld in the states.

I got a chance to talk with the CEO of Veeam, Ratmir Timashev. As it turns out he attended the University of Ohio.  I will try not to hold that against him.  Being from Florida there is a little college rivalry between the Ohio Buckeyes and the Florida Gators.  Go Gators!  All joking aside, it was great to meet them all and to finally get to meet a lot of people that I have been communicating with on Twitter.  Carrie, Doug, Rick, and George, thank you for the hospitality and a great evening!

After the Veeam party a big group of us ended up going to an Irish Pub in France.  Who would have thought?  It was a lot of fun.  Quite packed and I almost forgot I was in France because most people were speaking English.

All and all a great start to a great adventure

Cannes, France, Steve Beaver, vmware, VMworld

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 6:10 am and is filed under Virtual Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.