Messing in Texas !!

1500 miles, 37 Travel Agencies and over 150 Travel agents and we survived!

Peter headed south on March 23 to the Lone Star State on the SLH ( Small Luxury Hotels) road show representing Hastings House on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.www.hastingshouse.com

I met up with the rest of the crew at the ultra hip W Hotel in Dallas whose motto is Whatever Whenever should probably been better left as just plain Whatever !!! There was our fearless leader Jon D. Makhmaltchi, Director of Global Sales at SLH and the rest of the crew who I was to spend the next five days with: Elizabeth Gullickson from the Sanctuary at Camelback Mountain in Scottsdale,Arizona,JJ ( We never did find out what those initials stand for) Doran from the Malmaison Group of properties based in Prague, Adriana Chardí Cobo representing two properties: Esenzia on the Riviera Maya and CasaNova in cosmopolitan Barcelona and last but not least Barbara Schmaelzle from the Sky Lodge in beautiful Park City, Utah.

Over the course of the next five days we met with many friendly Texas Travel Agents who all assured us that SLH was the best thing since sliced bread and that they would send us more business than we could cope with ! From the biggest little town in the west , Fort Worth to the shining metropolis of Dallas and the state capital, Austin we ended in the oil town of Houston.

The weather gods were kind this year ( apparently last year it felt like the second coming of Noah!) We met with two very special dogs in Dallas, bats in Austin and full size Chinese warrior statues in Houston.!We sampled the Texas cuisine from Burgers in Dallas, Tex Mex in St Antonio to Chic - filet's (Yum!) in Austin . We even visited Jon's ancestral home in St Antonio that once had been a whorehouse!

It was a great trip and we are all busy following up with all who we met !

We messed with Texas and survived ! Yeeeha !