Experience This: August 2006
Author: Carla Breer Howard
August 2006
Features
Our August issue is about expanding the horizons of your experience: Going deeper; going higher, exceeding your expectations; reactivating your senses, rediscovering your motivation and your courage, your feeling of just being vitally alive.
Since my last column in this space in March, I’ve done more stretching of my horizons (and my waistband, truth-be-told) than I have since my 20s. I’ve been shot up out of the water by a strong young porpoise in Ixtapa. I’ve gone ziplining along a cable at 60 mph down a Park City ski slope. I’ve snorkeled behind a green sea turtle off the Kohala Coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. I’ve blasted gleefully down a hill into a powdery bowl, snowmobiling at 50 mph at Daniels Summit, Utah. And, as I write this, I’m about to go to Spokane and experience white-water rafting for the first time. Incidentally, that’s me on the Harley at Scottsdale’s Sensational FAM in May (just posing, natch).
If you had asked me, before this last nine months, whether I expected to have any of those experiences in this time of my life, I would have laughed. I’m a good-time girl (with a book), and I’ll bet there are plenty of us cautious ones around who attend the meetings you arrange. Your mission and ours, as I see it, is to propel us out of our comfort zones into new worlds so we return to our places revitalized on a whole new level.
In this month’s cover story, we’ve opened up more of Nevada—to emphasize the vast areas known as Cowboy Country, Pony Express Territory and Pioneer Territory. While we’ve also gone to Las Vegas, Reno and Tahoe in this story, writer Chuck Kapelke’s View from Vegas column already covers all the news that’s fit to print, as they say, every month. Additionally, we have done focused features on both Reno and Lake Tahoe in recent months. We hope you’ll be inspired to find out more about cowboy poetry, ghost towns, cattle ranches and other vestiges of Nevada’s Old West.
Using novel experiences to stimulate performance is as old as the serpent chatting up Eve, but lately, with all the sophisticates out there, the bar has been raised. In our incentive meetings story on page 28, you’ll find some new ways of approaching the age-old problem of keeping it fresh and motivating. Our Food & Beverage column this month adds dimension to the theme. Exhibition industry guru Charles Allen shares with us the breakthrough technology of HypoSurface in our “Did You Know” department on page 10, where signage reacts to us as it undulates across the ceiling, the floor and the walls.
Use this issue, and those going forward, to weave your own ideas for extraordinary experiences into your groups’ programs. Enjoy the rest of the summer!
Experience This
