David LaPlante

Backseat Blogger: Staying Connected from Reno to Heavenly, Lake Tahoe in a Car

I hope that the collective marketers responsible for the Reno/Lake Tahoe destination become more aggressive in trumpeting its connectivity and ability to serve the 'Always On' crowd. While we're a far cry from Philly or the SF Goofleplex and our RNO airport wifi isn't free...from a cell service perspective we're blanketed. It's pretty hard to play in the Tahoe basin and not have great cell service.

The conventional thought is that "staying connected" is not appealing to people who are trying to play in Reno-Tahoe. This is misguided. The Travel Industry Association recently released results that concluded:

• "While the point of a vacation may be to “get away from it all,” travelers bring a surprising amount of technology with them in order to stay connected during their leisure trips, according to the latest Voice of the Traveler survey by the Travel Industry Association (TIA) and Synovate."
• "Thanks to technology, travelers no longer have to wait until they return from vacation to share their stories – 18 percent use the Internet to stay connected with family and friends while traveling. Nearly as many use the Internet while traveling to find places to visit or things to do (16%), or choose accommodations based on availability of a high-speed Internet connection or Wi-Fi access (15%)."

Clearly we wired business folk like to have our connectivity. Nothing STRESSES out an 'Always On' executive more than being 'OFF'. (If you happen to be the proprietor of an establishment in Reno-Tahoe, I politely remind you that it is 2006 and it's about time to get that wifi thing licked.)

So, I recently had a meeting up at Heavenly in South Lake Tahoe. So.Lake is about 50-60 a minute drive from my office in south Reno. (From 1996 thru 2000 Martin, Matt, Johnny and I raced the R.A.T.S. town league ski races and routinely made it from Reno to the base of Heavenly in under 50 minutes twice a week leaving at 4pm for a 5pm race-start.)

Carson City is much larger now and that's no longer possible to do it under 50 minutes without serious risk to yourself and others.

Now, it's no secret that I suck at driving. I really do. I just don't care. Hey - I grew up in Crested Butte. The only need for a car was to drive after the bus closed, to get 4wd somewhere to ride your bike, or to drive to Gunnison to go to school. Parallel parking is still one of my greatest fears. Before I graduated high school I'd totaled two of my Dad's cars...yeah. Best to let me ride in the back seat...

Which is why I was STOKED to note that I was able to sustain a permanent VPN connection over Sprint's 3g EVDO cellular network from Reno to So. Lake without so much as a hiccup in service. I was able to instant message over Yahoo and Skype the whole time and iTunes was downloading the Brian Krolicki podcast Robert and Josh had just laid down. Pretty cool.

 

tags: Reno, Nevada, Heavenly, Lake Tahoe, tahoe, Sprint, cell, 3g, wireless, wifi, alwayson, connected, vacation, travel, skiing, snowboarding

Time-lapse video of Reno Balloon Races on Front Page of You Tube

renobaloonraces
Originally uploaded by dave_laplante.

There's a very cool video time lapse video of the Reno Balloon Races on the front page of You Tube this morning. Put up by a user called tlapse, the video is time-lapse photography of what appears to be Sunday's race. With over 110,000 views, ~700 comments and a 4.5 star rating, this is a Reno marketer's dream come true. Somebody give this man a free weekend at the Siena!

The Reno Balloon Races is one of Reno's best events...not that we have a shortage of them. You simply can't go wrong with hundreds of brightly colored balloons and kids. (Side note: the front cover of this week's Business Week Magazine is hot air balloons. Josh & Robert blog about it here.)

While we as a family didn't make it to dawn patrol this year (getting up at 5am on a Sunday is hard!!!), we made it there in time to watch the whole gaggle go off while we kicked back and drank hot chocolate and coffee.

renoballoonraces_family
Originally uploaded by dave_laplante.

The boys and I enjoying some hot chocolate at the Reno Balloon Races.

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2000 Miles, 2 weeks, 2 Kids and an iPod

Logan & Cody Sharing iPod
Originally uploaded by dave_laplante.

We just returned from a family vacation back to my hometown of Crested Butte, Colorado. With that vacation came about two weeks of being on the road. Two thousand miles in the car with two kids and one iPod to be exact.

We took no DVDs nor any DVD player. My Tablet PC laptop doesn't have a CD/DVD drive. We didn't watch one DVD the whole trip. Furthermore, we didn't go see Superman or Pirates. When the kids wanted a "media fix" (which was when they were settling down for bed around 9p or 10p) they snacked on iPod videos.

TV appears to be all but is dead in our house now. We have no cable TV. All content is coming on a DVD or from a computer now. And -- for the moment -- our kids are more than OK with this. The proof is an incident free vacation with no DVD, no TV and a lot of outdoors.

Kudos to Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender animation. It's an entertaining story for kids...and adults. Somehow it's managed to have broken their love-affair for Power Rangers and is fun to watch for parents. I'm actually anticipating the next episode!

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