SME Annual Meeting, Phoenix. Sunday

I arrived in Phoenix at 2200 local time yesterday, after a gruelling 22 hour journey from Falmouth. The security checks at the BA gate at Heathrow were intense and I would advise anyone thinking of travelling to the USA to think twice about it unless the journey is really necessary. Each passenger on the packed Boeing 747-400 was subjected to a body search and thorough hand-baggage inspection, which delayed the flight by an hour and a half.

Finally picking up my baggage, after an interminable wait at Phoenix immigration, I met up with Industrial Minerals’ Mike O’Driscoll and Ismene Clarke and shared a taxi to the Hyatt Regency Hotel. After a few hours' sleep, I was up and about in a jet-lagged state at 3am looking forward to the day ahead.

After venturing out into a cold and wet downtown Phoenix, I called in at a local café for breakfast, which should keep me going until the end of the week (thank God I brought my own coffee out with me though!), and then called in at the convention centre for early registration. The exhibition is slightly bigger than last year in Denver, with 630 booths, compared with 603, and over 3000 delegates are pre-registered, so final numbers are likely to be about the same as last year (over 4000).

The exhibition was formally opened in the late afternoon. I spent an hour there but only found one minerals engineer that I recognised, Pejman Oghazi of Lulea University, Sweden, who will be presenting a paper tomorrow, and also at Comminution ’10 next month.