So, this weekend I’ve been getting everything together to go to Savannah November 4-7 to attend the GeekEnd social media conference. I booked my flight Friday afternoon, and I bought my ticket to the conference over the weekend. I still needed to find a hotel room though. I figured I’d do that first thing this morning at work. Actually, I had to put together an “urgent” HTML file and do an update on our home page, so it wasn’t first thing, but by mid-morning I got around to it. I found two hotels that seemed to be well-liked and were within the budget my company gave me.
Over the weekend I talked to my friend Otto who has spent a lot of time in Savannah. He gave me a lot of tips on where to stay, and what to do. “One street you want to avoid is MLK Boulevard,” he told me. “That is not a place you want to be after dark.”
Guess where the hotels are located? One is on MLK and the other is a block off it.
Guess where my conference is located? Two blocks from MLK.
I e-mailed Otto and asked for more advice. “Where they’re holding your conference is basically Bumland,” he told me.
Bumland. Great.
He told me I’d be better off staying near the river, and cabbing it to and from the conference. Well, that’s a great idea, except when I put in the request I didn’t budget any money for cabs.
No problem, I figured, I like to walk. I got on Google Maps and examined the area near the river. Every time I saw a hotel I pulled up its website.
Nothing within $50 of my nightly budget for hotels.
So I guess I’m staying in Bumland.
Actually, the hotels within my price range both received a lot of praise in their customer reviews, with the Springhill Suites having a near-perfect score. No one mentioned anything about either hotel being in a bad neighborhood.
I’ve lived in Downtown Memphis for eight years, and I’ve walked all over, sometimes with my laptop. From 2002 when I moved down here up until about 2008, Downtown Memphis was definitely Bumland. I didn’t have any problems.
When I go to Little Rock, I stay at a hotel at 6th and Broadway because it’s inexpensive for Downtown and it has free Wi-Fi. 6th and Broadway is definitely Bumland. Yet when I stay there I feel comfortable enough walking almost a mile to the Saucer. This year I may walk five blocks west to Vino’s at 7th and Chester. I’m definitely going to be alert and aware of my surroundings, but I won’t be afraid to make the walk.
So when I go to Savannah, I guess I’ll be staying in Bumland. I’ll probably take the netbook rather than the MacBook, so in the worst case scenario I’m only putting a $250 computer at risk rather than a $1500 computer.
Maybe I can meet some Savannah bums and compare notes with them, to see if they use the same scams as the Memphis bums. “Do you do the flower man gimmick?” I can ask them. “Where you pick flowers out of a public bed and then try to sell them to tourists? What about the tour guide gimmick? Have you ever pulled a bunch of free newspapers out of the box and tried to sell them?”
Whatever the situation, I’m going to make the best of it. There’s a lot to be learned and a lot of fun to be had after-hours… even in Bumland.