At the end of January I had a short work trip to Minneapolis for an event with one of our Partners. It was a good opportunity to catch up with a bunch of people I had not seen in a while, and one of the fun aspects of this event is that they do ice fishing as part of the last big social event of the night!
I wasn’t trilled about heading to Minneapolis with all that has been going on of late, but it was an important event for us, in trying to build up our business. The event was two days - I was arriving Wednesday afternoon and we had an evening event on Wednesday followed by a couple of sessions on Thursday, plus the ice fishing event Thursday night. And then I had a flight home on Friday.
The flight down was easy and I was at the hotel by about 6:00. We had an evening event starting at 7:30, so I had a good amount of time. I was meeting Mike, one of our sales people, at the airport and we Uber’ed over together. The evening event was a fun - a little “casino night” where we were playing blackjack for fake money. I managed to catch up with many old friends and colleagues, as this event was also a big one for my former company. It wasn’t too late a night, as Thursday was really the big day.
On Thursday we had two session. In the morning, we had a short presentation to all the partner’s people, and then in the afternoon there was a two-hour min trade show for us to show all our new products. That went well, and I got to catch up with lots of people that I had not seen on Wednesday night.
Our table at the event. Nothing fancy, but I got to see lots of old friends.
The venue was really nice, and they had some amazing beers.
After the mini trade show, everyone was taking a fancy bus over to the evening event at Birch’s on the Lake, a brew pub, which as the name suggested, was on the lake. They bring in very fancy ice fishing trailers and so you could stay inside the pub, sit outside at a series of really nice fires, or head out and do some ice fishing. I managed to do all three!
My night didn’t actually start off that great. We were in the middle of a major crisis, and so I had two conference calls I needed to do around the time that all the festivities were going on. As the venue itself was quite loud, I ended up doing the calls from outside. It was at least -10C and supposed to drop to -21C overnight, but I was dressed properly and managed to find a couple of good spots to sit to keep warm and be able to do my calls without bothering anyone (and so I could hear the call!)
I did part of the calls standing next to this fire table.
And some of the calls from this wonderful fire. It worked out pretty well.
After getting work out of the way, I wander around checking out the fishing huts and the pub. The food was really good, so I grabbed some dinner and managed to hang out with some of my favorite people.
I spent some time socializing inside, had a few drinks and some great food. But eventually it was time to head back outside and check out the ice fishing. I really wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it was not what I found!
My favorite photo from the night.
Growing up in Ontario, I had been ice fishing a few times. It was a long time ago, and it involved sitting out on the ice on chairs (if you were lucky, buckets if not) and enduring the elements. This was not that. They had pulled these 7 trailers out onto the ice to provide a very civilized ice fishing experience.
I didn’t spend a lot of time fishing. I gave it a try for a good half hour and never even got a bite. That seemed to be standard for everyone, but about 10 people did catch fish. Good for them. I went back in and continued socializing until it was time to grab a bus back to the hotel. We hung out in the lobby bar area for a while until it was time to call it a night. It was a great event!
The trip home was not great. I made the tactical error of flying through Chicago. The weather turned on us and I ended up with 7 delays before the flight finally got underway and headed back to Vancouver.