I've Escaped!

Well, I made it to hot and sunny Arizona for Creative Escape. I am now sitting in my gorgeous room at the Wild Horse Pass Sheraton, enjoying my Desertscape Dessert...



... is this not the cutest thing? The Creative Escape Staff had it waiting in my room. And it is as tasty as it is cute!

Well, today, I started off with a bus tour of the Bazzill Basics Paper warehouse (complete with shopping!) ... we got pizza boxes full of paper (someone counted about 120 sheets in each) for $20 - whoo-hoo!





After grabbing lunch and jumping on the bus, we headed to Scrapbooks Etc., the scrapbook store owned by the Bazzill Basics family. Second time I have been to the store and I enjoyed it just as much.



Mr. Bazzill himself, Doug Jones, gave the tour of the facility. Here are some fun facts:

* The Bazzill warehouse is 65,000 square feet.
* Bazzill employs more than 80 people.
* Bazzill has more than 600 cardstocks.
* The warehouse processes 500,000 sheets of cardstock each day.
* The Bazzill Basics company was launched in 2000 when Doug's wife Marti couldn't find quality cardstock for the store.



Franny, here, managed to escape her home in Baton Rouge, LA, before Gustav hit. She lost part of the roof of her house ... good luck with that Franny! (P.S. I emailed these photos to you...watch for them!) There was news that some ladies are stuck in Lousiana still because of damamge left from the storm. I am so bummed for them!

Here is a group of us in the parent sheet warehouse. Each parent sheet is about 2x3 feet and gets cut down to to the cardstock sheets we know and love.



The gal in the pink shirt (not her best side, of course, but she has the only pictutre of us! ) is Leanne, my Canadian Mountie bus mate from Prince Edward Island.

When we got back to the hotel, I checked in and wandered around to take a look at the place. I found my classroom. I am in the Roadrunner room. Beep! Beep! Here are the palettes of boxes outside the classroom. Apprently these have extra Jessica Guthries... the world should be worried....




Now, it is off to the Yahoo! message board Meet and Greet! More later...

Note: I dunno how I did it, but I forgot to metion my dinner dates, a California pair and an Atlanta pair who, along with me, had just met on the little ferry boat that takes you from the resort to the nearby Rawhide ranch and casino. The "river" is manmade, about a half-mile long and represents the Gila River, which dried up decades ago.