The 2013 ACR Meeting: Mad Macs at the Marina

San Diego, the site of the 2013 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) meeting, sits like a vision of the future at the far tip of the United States, just up the road from Mexico and smack next to the Pacific Ocean. Like its siblings in California, Los Angeles and San Francisco, San Diego is one of the geographic last stops of the American dream. For centuries, people have trekked across the country to find a better life in the Golden State, searching for jobs and opportunity but also a Mediterranean climate replete with palm trees and orange groves, cool breezes that sweep in from the ocean, and brilliant sunsets where gulls circle overhead to call out the arrival of night. What a great place to be! It is so beautiful that you forget the smog, landslides, earthquakes, congestion, an antiquated tax system, a mayor gone wild, and fractious politics that recently have made the Golden State sometimes less than golden. Housing a worldwide congress requires a big venue with lots of space. The San Diego Convention Center is gigantic, stretching probably a mile along the bay. I would say that it is as big as a battleship but that would not be true since the convention center is right next to the USS Midway (a carrier not a battleship) and the convention center looks far, far larger. I honestly have never seen corridors so long nor spent so much time walking from room to room at a meeting. I wished that the city or county leaders had put the light rail system with its snappy red cars inside the convention center instead of outside on Harbor Boulevard. Its location there would have made the transit from session to session much quicker, with the clanging of warning bells—ding ding ding—as the train approached jazzing up the proceedings. A convention hall the size of San Diego’s has its plusses and minuses, although, remarkably, even though the center had a gazillion square feet of space (actually 615,700, according to Wikipedia), some of the sessions were held in the nearby Hilton with its shining marble façade and rooms with romantic names like the Indigo or Sapphire.