Okay, here's the deal: I'm typing this from the TV in our hotel room, which is spotty at best and freezes up on occasion. Rather than type a long essay only to lose it before I post it, I shall type a paragraph at a time and post it, then edit the blog entry and add another paragrah, and so on..

Whew, took me a bit longer than expected to come back! Anyway, we arrived in Mt Vernon at around 12:30pm and were heartily greeted by Skate(modee), who led us to the office where she, Christy and Sprouty work. Nice big flat screen monitors they all have ;-) We were then joined by Case right before making our way to lunch. Unfortunately, Skate couldn't join us for lunch, but at least I got a chance to meet her and talk to her a bit :-)

We went to an Italian place a few blocks away. Mt Vernon looked like your quintessential small town, not unlike downtown Santa Barbara with its small streets, many of which were one-way.

I ended up chatting quite a bit with Case, who, as the founder of Case's Ladder, had quite a bit of insight into the company from the business end, very eye-opening for someone like me, who has only experienced Grab from an end-user perspective. It was fascinating to hear the rationale for various aspects of their business model.

I didn't end up talking to Sprout or Christy as much as I would've liked, as we only had a short time there, and besides, when you put 2 naturally shy and introverted people together, you aren't going to get much of a conversation ;-) A bit of a bummer. Still, it was cool to meet the guy I've interacted with frequently on CL-related issues, in person at last :-D It's nice to put a face to the screenname, and now that I've seen their offices, I have a better visual of what it's like on their end whenever I talk to any of them.

We ended the visit with a video that Case had dug out, which put together various snapshots and short video clips of the Grab staff in the early days (early 2005), featuring all sorts of familiar faces such as Lex, Wemmick, deuce, foobonic, ricemag, touchdown and krustykreme (plus more, but those are the ones who I remember primarily because of their frequent presence on the user-visible parts of Grab in those early days). I even recognized a few of the pics from the webcam shots of the "war room" when Grab 2.0 came out in March 2005.

A couple hours after arriving in Mt Vernon, we were on our way to the local Wal-Mart to do some shopping for stuff to tide us over the next 2 weeks-- stuff we couldn't easily pack into our luggage, such as diapers and formula, as well as food and water. We made it uneventfully across the border (where there was a gorgeous flowerbed arrangement in the shape of the Canadian flag on the ground), and into Vancouver by 6pm. Exhausted as ever, but not nearly as exhausted as we would've been, had we stuck to our original plans and gone straight to Vancouver after arriving in Seattle late Sunday night. And so ends this blog entry... and starts a new one :-)