Traveling to Maker Faires, conferences, etc

From DP

Bay Area Maker Faire (San Francisco, California)

• Airline: British Airways. Amsterdam->London->San Francisco. Every flight on British Airways is the worst ever. Old crappy planes, really poor connections through London Heathrow.
• Airport transit: BART subway. We stay in downtown San Francisco for a few days to eat tacos in the Mission District and hang out at Instructables. Easily accessible by BART.
• Car: Required. Supposedly you can take public transit to Maker Faire: end of BART to CalTrain, but it would still be a whole lot of unpleasant walking along roads. We stay downtown for a few days then take BART back to the airport to pick up the car. Rental cars are pretty cheap in California.
• Hotel: Renoir hotel. About a 15 minute drive to Maker Faire.
• Event size: Huge and unwieldy. If you're presenting expect to talk constantly 12hours+ per day.
• Food: Taco crawl from 16th and Mission (16th street BART stop) to 24th and Mission, then down 24th street for even more. If you like hoppy California ales and fancy bratworst, check out the resteraunt on the corner of 24th and Mission before getting back on the BART.

New York Maker Faire (New York, New York)

• Airline: Aer Lingus. Amsterdam->Dublin->New York. One of the top flights ever. Brand new Airbus A330, polite and helpful crew, easy connections. Great leg room in coach. Free WIFI in the airport. If you're in Dublin early and see your server crashed, there's a bar that severs Guinness and Whiskey from 6am. We will only fly Aer Lingus to New York in the future.
• Airport transit: Abysmal. The taxis have a racket on airport transportation, public transit is almost out of the question (5+ transfers by bus). It'll cost $30 to get to the conference hotel in Queens.
• Car: Don't even think about it. Go to the hotel by Taxi, then take the subway everywhere else. The conference hotel was two stops by subway, Times Square was 30 minutes away, Maker Bot cave and NYC Resistor are a full hour. Subways run 24 hours, which is helpful.
• Hotel: XXXX. Two subway stops to the Maker Faire.
• Event size: Medium. Not as busy or big as Bay Area, but still good sized.
• Food: Expensive. The conference hotel was in a China/Korea town, so we ate a lot of Chinese food with the guys from Seeed. We sought out several of our favorites in NYC, but overall food was expensive and disappointing.

Homecamp (London, UK)

• Airline: British Airways. Amsterdam->Gatwick (outside London). Another crappy BA flight, but at least they could only screw this one up a little.
• Airport transit: Gatwick is 'conveniently' located about an hour from London via a $50 Gatwick Express train ride to Victoria station. From Victoria station it is a few stops to Kings Cross (of Harry Potter fame) where Homecamp4 was held.
• Car: Don't even think about it. Public transit the whole time. There is a 7pound all-day transit ticket that is a great value if you're checking things out before or after the conference.
• Event size: Intimate. You'll get to know lots of people and their projects personally.
• Hotel: Swindon Hotel, 1 block from Homecamp. Cheap but pretty dingy, mum wouldn't stay there, but at least it's not a hostel. Remember to hand over your key every time you leave.
• Food: Expensive and bland. We were hopeful about several huge street food markets, but all the food was expensive, bland, and not made with very high quality ingredients.

Make Tokyo Meeting (Tokyo, Japan)

• Airline: Finnair. Amsterdam->Helsinki->Tokyo. Best. Flight. Ever. They wined and dined us the whole way, even the short hops. Brand new, spotless Airbus A330. They even cleaned the bathrooms during the flight. Most leg room of any flight we've been on. Cheerful and polite crew continued the barrage of food and drink even during the night hours of the flight. Power in every seat, even coach! Easy 10 minute connections both ways in Helsinki. Finnair is running the cheapest and shortest flights from Europe to Asia, and we'll only fly them in the future, including our trip to Maker Faire China in a few months.
• Airport transit: $30 Skyliner bullet train (36 minutes) from Narita airport to Nippori station in Tokyo. Put your ticket into the gate at Nippori to transfer to the subways and JR line trains, you won't get the ticket back. At Nippori use a machine to buy a Pasmo card - 1000Yen gets the card with 500Yen credit, that should get you started. From Nippori we took Yamanoto line to Meguro (30 minutes), which is only a few stops from the Make Tokyo Meeting 07 location and Tokyo hackerspace.
• Car: Don't even think about it. Public transit is superb and runs every 2-3minutes from 6am to 12am.
• Event size: Medium-large. Not as big as the US Maker Faires, but still very busy and popular.
• Hotel: Princess Garden, 5 minutes from Meguro station. Was cheap and extremely clean. Amenities included a fridge and fancy Japanese toilet.
• Food: Wild. Our favorites were noodle bars, Tokyo Food Show in Shibuya, the shaved-beef-on-rice chain, and anywhere salary men gather after work. Food prices are really reasonable, beer is gonna cost you $10-$20 a pint though.

Maker Faire tips

• Bring a table cloth, tape, etc.
• Bring extra connectors and cords. If you have enough, you might get an invitation to London by loaning out an extra.
• Bring business cards. We go through around 2000 in SF and NY, 1000 in Tokyo.