{"id":8035,"date":"2010-10-18T12:34:50","date_gmt":"2010-10-18T17:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/?p=8035"},"modified":"2010-10-18T12:34:50","modified_gmt":"2010-10-18T17:34:50","slug":"bumland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/18\/bumland\/","title":{"rendered":"“Bumland”"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, this weekend I’ve been getting everything together to go to Savannah November 4-7 to attend the GeekEnd<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend I talked to my friend Otto<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n

Guess where the hotels are located? One is on MLK and the other is a block off it.<\/p>\n

Guess where my conference is located? Two blocks from MLK.<\/p>\n

I e-mailed Otto and asked for more advice. “Where they’re holding your conference is basically Bumland,” he told me.<\/p>\n

Bumland. Great.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Nothing within $50 of my nightly budget for hotels.<\/p>\n

So I guess I’m staying in Bumland.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"