The Mortgage Bankers Association's annual convention was set for Orlando in 2005. So far, so good. I'd been to a million meetings in Orlando, and here was one more. The trouble was, Florida was also set for a visit at the same time by a monster hurricane named Wilma.
We thought about not going to the show here at the Mortgage Group. It looked to be a wet and wild ride down to Orlando as the hurricane pounded ashore farther south of there. Of course, with a hurricane, you never really know where it will land well in advance. It could easily have turned and hit closer to Orlando. My boss came up with the solution. Go a day early. That way, we would catch the full brunt of the storm on the ground, but there would be less rocking and rolling on the plane ride down.
The show was at the Dolphin and Swan on the Disney grounds. (They are two separate hotels but I always think of them together.) I wasn't staying there, but was at the Hilton, a few miles away, also on the Disney grounds. It was raining pretty hard when I cautiously drove over to the Dolphin and Swan on the Sunday afternoon for the opening of the exhibit hall, the opening reception, and our own event, the Mortgage Technology Awards.
The exhibit hall was a sea of no-shows. Booths set up to accommodate dozens of officials from nationwide lenders were manned only by one or two local Florida reps. Still, there was an esprit de corps among us who had shown up. The hurricane was projected to land a couple of hundred miles away, so how bad could it be? There was a similar giddy feel to the opening reception, which sponsor FiServ dubbed its hurricane party.
We had to go from the Dolphin to the Swan afterward to attend our own party, and as I did I saw the weather had deteriorated quickly. It was raining buckets. There was a path with a roof between the two buildings, but the covering was useless, as a snapping wind drove the rain at you sideways. Everyone who made the crossing got thoroughly wet except my boss, who took a taxi from the Dolphin to the Swan, a distance of about 100 yards.
We had a great awards ceremony, complete with hula dancers, and quite a few people braved the weather to be there. So far, still so good. But I wondered what the next day would be like.
The morning was bad, with belting rain and winds over 40 MPH. Space is always at a premium at an MBA annual, and we had arranged a roundtable discussion with industry experts for Monday morning. Was the weather bad? Well, we had pulled chairs together out in a corridor for our discussion. Nearby, a steady stream of water fell from the ceiling into a bucket. Disney was leaking and taking on water.
In the afternoon, the weather improved, but I was thoroughly impressed by Wilma. We'd been two hundred miles from the center but it was still as nasty a storm as you'd ever want to go through.
The storm had come in from the Gulf of Mexico and hit southern Florida. Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach had taken direct hits. As it happened, my parents had moved into a retirement home in West Palm Beach just a couple of weeks before the storm, so I decided to drive down and check on them.
The first thing I noticed, after getting off the Florida Turnpike, was that all the traffic lights in the city were out. You may not think this is so bad, but it turned driving into total anarchy, and I had eight or ten miles of it to go.
Then, when I got to my parents' building, I got another indication of the power of the storm. A row of royal palms, massive trees twenty feet high at least, had been pulled from the ground by the storm like weeds, and now rested against the outside of the building.
My parents were fine. I decided to keep going down to Miami to visit someone I knew there. There was a party atmosphere in that ultimate party city, even though there was still a partial curfew on Miami Beach. When I got to South Beach, I noticed SoBe was piebald. Blocks with electricity alternated with blocks in total blackness.
There are two arts weeklies in Miami (or, there were in 2005). I don't remember which of them it was, but their front page caught the experience of Wilma perfectly. The whole front page was taken up by a cartoon image of Wilma Flintstone. The headline was one pithy word- BITCH!
Hopefully, there won't be foul weather for MBA's upcoming servicing conference in Orlando. Expect a lot of mortgage bankers, with wives and kids in tow. There may be some theme parks for them to go to, but I'm not the expert there. Don't think me un-American, but I've only gone once in all my visits to Orlando!
