Manchester YSA conference 2009: Friday afternoon ' getting there'

Well it was time, the time that I've been yammering on about for the past few months. Yes conference was finally here and it was time to hit the road.

I decided to repeat what I did last year and set out at around 3pm as this time worked last year, it enabled me to get there in plenty of time and get settled in before things started.

However nobody seems to have told the rest of the traffic that fact as there was a lot of it around. A heck of a lot, even more then you would expect for a bank holiday. I got stuck in a huge great traffic jam. Which was annoying as I had nobody talk to but it did enable me to sing along to the radio in my usual tuneless way with out annoying anyone.

The only thing that makes a long traffic jam where you stuck in a car by yourself worse is being stuck by yourself in a traffic jam and it starts to rain. Yes it seemed that the weathermen had not stuck their head out of the window when forecasting the weather for the weekend. I tried to be cheerful and hope that the weather would improve and we would get the sun we were promised but I was already starting to wonder.

When I finally got to Manchester I made a error somewhere and missed the right turning which lead me into a bit of a tour round Manchester as I tried to find my bearings and the campus. I suppose it was yet another example of how satnav can be useful in certain situations( somewhere in the depths of Luxembourg Engineseer begins his I told you so victory dance).

Still it wasn't as bad a case of getting lost as my first conference and I was only delayed about 20 minutes after basically driving round in a huge circle to get back where I needed to go. I did wonder if it was a good sign to see a group of campus staff getting a boat out of a shed on a trailer and filling up scuba tanks! Did they know something about the weather we didn't?

I arrived and collected my keys in a totally different registration process for the fourth year in a row ( maybe it's like a rule) and was a bit dismayed to see that we had gone back to wristbands again for all conference attendees. I much prefer passes around your neck as you can take them off when you shower unlike the wristbands which quite frankly get annoying. Plus also at the end of the weekend you can keep them as a memento without having to cut them off your wrists!

I also found that they had swapped the guys and girls halls again so I was in different halls to the set I've been in the past two years. I then discovered that I was in fact in the furtherest room in the furtherest possible hall from the car park. Which did start to get annoying as the weekend wore on.

Still I was there, I had arrived and as I started to get my stuff settled in my room I pondered what the weekend would bring. As the saying goes " There was everything to play for".