Jon,
Thank You for your support and commitment to attend the AC conference. Your participation will assure a success of this event no matter where the site. Our minds are certainly open to other venues.
The advantage for Branson Missouri is that the it is a pleasant family friendly atmosphere with lots to do and will be reasonably priced for accomodations, meeting space etc.
Perhaps the biggest advantage is that our two volunteer meeting facilitators (Brian and me) are close enough to keep a hands on management at no cost to the users. That being said, I am very willing to change the location to a more exotic locale such as Colorado (we love it there). I know Colorado quite well and could help set up a meeting in Estes Park, Breckenridge, Vail, Keystone etc.
If we do hold the meeting in Branson MO, attendees could fly into KC, St. Louis or Tulsa to stay with SW Airlines. Tulsa's airport is on the north side of the city and offers the advantage of several routes to drive to Branson through the Ozarks. Of course, you can also check the rates into Springfield MO; I hear that they have become much more reasonable of late.
If we did change the meeting site to Colorado, we would still have to drive a couple of hours from the Denver airport to reach our meeting site; I doubt that anyone would want to travel that far just to meet in Denver - it would be great to vacation and relax a bit together as well. I suspect that we will learn almost as much visiting with each other outside the meeting times as we do during the talks. A drive from Tulsa airport to Branson should be around two and a half hours and thirty minutes from Springfield/Branson Regional Airport.
Barb and I are up for either and would appreciate the thoughts of the other board users. All we need is six commitments to pull the trigger on the meeting although there will undoubtedly be more to follow after the plan is set. So far we have commitments from Jon, Brian, Leslie and me for Branson and from Jon and me for Colorado. Please post your thoughts and votes and try to make a decision by next Wednesday to allow appropriate planning.
Best,
Jim
