End of the road (trip) - Invercargill

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Windows Mobile Truck at Bluff Today we are in Invercargill.  Today is the last day of our Road Trip.  Today is kind of a sad day.

We've had a great time driving around the country presenting on Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008.  I think those who have come along have enjoyed the road trip too - certainly the feedback we've had has been good.  We've had a number of people tell us that this is the best presentation they've ever been to, and the feedback on the evaluation forms has been extremely positive, which is all pretty good in our mind.Last meal at the Drunken Sailor at Bluff

Today we went right on through Invercargill to Bluff and had a final meal together as a team.  This was a nice (if a little rushed) lunch, in a great location on a great day.

The Invercargill User Group crew did a great job of getting word out about the Road Trip and we had a very respectable number of people come along, which was satisfying for the last event on the trip.

JB and Chris discuss the missing Photos tableFor the last time on our road trip, we sat through the usual banter, although of all the audiences Invercargill seemed the most muted.  If audience indication is anything to go by, two people here do .Net development and one person works with Windows Server,  however the feedback indicated that they were very happy with the content, so obviously they are just a quiet bunch down here.Chris and Jeremy at Invercargill Airport

We managed to get rid of all our prizes except a few copies of Vista (which will go to the winners of the Servers when they are drawn on March 5).  We've got rid of several hundreds of bottles of water, driven over 3,000km's in the Windows Mobile truck, spoken to over 1000 people, endured temperatures between 8 and 32 degrees, hit just one (living) animal (oops), drunk about 30 bottles of coke, sampled coffee in around 15 towns and cities in NZ, taken thousands of photos (I have nearly 900 on my own), recorded about 15 hours of video, heard Chris say "well done, sir" about 45 times and heard JB say "thats not our website, man" eleven times.

I (and I'm sure JB and Chris too) want to say a big thanks to all the user group leaders around the country who put in many hours of their own to make the event happen, and really put in the extra effort to get the word out there and get so many people along.  I also want to say a huge thanks to Intergen and Mindscape - without whom this wouldn't have been possible.

Like I said at the beginning - the New Zealand community ROCKS!