It's true. I was pretty excited when I heard about a chance to ride along with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell of DotNetRocks. It was a promotion put on by Telerik where one lucky victim from each city would get to ride in the RV with them to the next city and watch that show.

Timeline:

• Several weeks before - heard about the RoadTrip on a DotNetRocks episode. Went to the site mentioned, but there wasn't a sign-up form yet. Set an alarm on my phone to remind me to check the site daily.
• A couple of weeks before - The form was there. I filled it in. I then told my wife about it and said that there was a insignificant chance that I might win that. I then realized that this was going to conflict with SqlSaturday in Huntington Beach.
• Monday 4/19 - canceled plans to go to SqlSaturday.
• Tuesday 4/20 - Beta 2 of a certain smart phone OS broke camera support. Boo. Did take a pocket camera with, but didn't take many shots with it.
  
• Friday 4/23 - went to the DotNetRocks RoadTrip event in Phoenix. Got there right at 6 PM. Chatted with Richard and mentioned how cool I thought the RoadTrip ride-along was. He said, "You should go." - They were going to pick me up on Saturday. I texted my wife. I found it rather hard to concentrate during the event.
• Saturday 4/24 - Carl and Richard drove the RV to my house, around 11 am - crazy - got onboard and away we went. Bound for Houston, some 1100 miles away. They opted for driving straight through. Chatted their ears off probably. We jury-rigged the PA speaker to a MP3 player so we could listen to old episodes of Mondays on the drive.
  
  
• Sunday 4/25 - Pulled in to Houston around 9 am. Around 20 hours with the time difference. Got a little sleep in the RV and a little more at the hotel after going for a walk. Later Richard, Tom (driver) and I met up with Zain Naboulsi (MS Dev Evangelist) for dinner and had some spirited discussions over a great dinner. Then just hung out with Richard for a couple of hours chatting about techie nerdy stuff.
• Monday 4/26 - Met up with Dustin Campbell and had really great sushi with everyone. Totally geeked out with Dustin about languages and Visual Studio. Then we went to the MS office, setup and they did the show. It was kinda neat to see them do a second show. Did a video interview with Todd of Telerik about the experience and we discussed some of the cool stuff in SiteFinity 4.0 CTP. Then we went back to the hotel. Sadly, the experience was over. Got about 2 hours of sleep then took a cab to IAH airport and got on my early flight back to PHX.
  
  

Really a great time.
Thanks Carl and Richard and Thanks Telerik!