A trip report in five installments covering my recent trip to New Orleans for fun and Houston for Grace Hopper – the largest conference for women in computing.
- Introduction
- SFO -> New Orleans
- Exploring Nallins
- SpringHill Suites Houston Downtown
- Grace Hopper
Introduction
This year was my second year attending Grace Hopper Conference, which typically runs from Wednesday-Friday with attendees flying in on Tuesday evening. Last year my friend and I took Monday and Tuesday as PTO and squeezed in a trip to Chicago before the conference.

Maybe our path to GHC was a bit indirect…
It was a great success: I got to experience Chicago for the first time, our SFO-CHI-PHX-SFO was only slightly more expensive than SFO-PHX-SFO, and we had a nice vacation without burning too many days of PTO.

Left: The famous Chicago bean. Right: Just hanging out at the Google office in Chicago. Also free lunch 😉
After purchasing our conference passes, we again wanted to include a trip before the conference – this time with even more of our #squad that was attending Grace Hopper.

The NoLa squad, a subset of the #squad of intelligent, fun, beautiful women that I’m friends with.
The conference was in Houston, so we decided on New Orleans as our vacation destination. It was pretty close to Houston and none of us had ever been there before. So this was our path to GHC:

Next post: some interesting things happened on our flight to NoLa.