Welcome to Opryland! Friday night’s highlight is a roast of the Immediate Past District Governor — I think that’s an awesome idea, and I’m going to suggest it in my home district — next year! Silvana Clark delivered a very funny and yet educational keynote on making club meetings more fun. The theme is “Change is A-OK!”, and includes fun ideas like beach ball bingo table topics (questions written on a beach ball, throw it around, and the catcher responds to the question closest to their right thumb), vacation photos, true newspaper headlines, and untraditional holidays.

There’s a great hospitality suite in one of the hotel rooms, with soda, small sandwiches and an endless supply of little snack cakes, cases and cases of them! In fact, these were a good number of the raffle prizes! They also have a silent auction with dozens of things to bid on, ranging from gently-used books to enormous gift baskets of coffee, tea, and chocolate!

Saturday starts off with an invitation-only breakfast, for those who reached specific goals. One neat idea is that anyone who has ever won the TI award for signing up 15 members within a single Toastmasters year (earning a scarf or tie) gets to attend these conference breakfasts for life — so I was eligible!

Lunch is followed by a short address by Dietmar Wagenknecht, the hall of fame awards and the evaluation contest. Mid-afternoon is the business meeting, and dinner is followed by the humorous speech contest.

Unfortunately, the district 43 conference is this same weekend in Memphis, but my campaign manager, Joan Diehl covered that since it’s her home district.