The interesting thing about this is that Ford intentionally did not invite any auto bloggers. Instead, the room was filled with design, art, fashion, personal, mom, dad, technology and other non-auto bloggers all coming from places around the world including Australia, USA, Thailand, France, England and a dozen other countries. And damn were we treated well! From getting advanced access to an unopened museum, behind the scenes look into Ford’s innovation and research centre, a special sectioned off area at the Auto Show where we had the opportunity to sit and talk with the VP and CEO of Ford, and fed delicious food at every meal. They spared no expense to make us all comfortable and the experience is something that I will remember for the rest of my life. (Oh, and that’s the extent of it haha. We didn’t get cash or anything… though I did order room service one hehe.)

Ford HQ as seen from my Room at The Henry Hotel

The day we arrived, we were given advanced access to The Henry Ford, a currently unopened 80,000 square foot museum home to some incredible pieces of history including Rosa Parks’ Bus, the limo Kennedy was assassinated in, and thousands of other really cool pieces of history!

Kennedy Assassination Limo

Reagan Car

Rosa Parks' Seat

Did you know Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were friends?

The next day was an early one… 6:30AM we had to be downstairs to get to the Detroit Auto Show for the Ford press conference where they were officially revealing the new Ford Fusion for the first time!

The media swarmed to get interviews and good pictures.

Let me just say… the Ford Fusion is an incredibly sexy looking car. Below is an image of the 2013 Ford Fusion, and below that is an Aston Martin… remove the branding, and it would be a difficult time trying to figure out which is which! While they didn’t give us an actual price point, they did say this car would be competitive with cars like the Cobalt, Golf, Matrix etc… it easily looks significantly more expensive than those cars. Additionally, I was pretty impressed with Ford’s new Plug-In Hybrid engine which gets 100mpge! That was 13mpg better than the nearest competitor, Toyota, who’s engine had 87mpge.

I also was asked to appear on the Jim Richards show on NewsTalk 1010 here in Toronto to talk about the Auto Show, which was a lot of fun. We talked about the new Ford Fusion, the show in general, how electric and mpg was a main priority, and somehow managed to talk about hookers in hotel rooms. Thanks Jim for having me on.

But, this was the International Auto Show… so here’s some of the stunning vehicles that were on display!

Every image was taken with my new Motorola RAZR! So happy with this phone.

[Show as slideshow]

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Now, for me this was pretty exciting because it was my first time to a different country than the US. In fact, it was only the 3rd time I’ve been out of Canada… so needless to say I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. The internet is full of horror stories, enough to instill enough fear in me that I essentially packed an entire pharmacy with me… I wish that was a joke. It’s a damn good thing I trust people more than the internet, because if I did, I would never leave my house. Quite frankly, starring at the wall is actually enjoyable for me. You see, every time I travel I seem to get sick. Vancouver, got a cold. New York, flu that nearly killed me (not literally, but I was with my dad’s asshole bitch ex-girlfriend and her bitch daughter at the time which made it feel like death). Quebec, fevers and debilitating migraines. I’d survive a nuclear war well, my body clearly loves being locked in a bunker.

(Apologies in advance, this post is image heavy. Live vicariously!  I’m going to split the trip up into 3 blog posts.) OH! And PS… All the images below were taken with my new Motorola RAZR which I received for being Canada’s Social BLAZR. Truly an incredible camera if you ask me. 8MP photos and 1080P HD video! Click the images to see them in better quality!

Our flight was at 8AM, which meant we had to be up at 4:30AM. Brutal… But after the four hour flight we walk into this…

29C. Sunny and humid. (While there is water on the ground, the only time it rained over the 8 days was at night time on 3 occasions.)

Now… I know that island lifestyle is a little more relaxed than it is in Canada or the US… but we had to wait about an 90 minutes for our bags. Here’s my little brother exhausted from waiting.

Finally they arrived though and we were on our way to the bus and then to the resort where *I* could finally change out of my long sleeve shirt and jeans.

Release the Kraken?

Then we finally arrived at the resort, which was very underwhelming to look at the exterior… but once we stepped inside…

Now at this point it’s about 3PM… our rooms won’t be ready for another 1-2 hours. Brutal. So me and my brother did the only common sense thing, we had our first beer of the day – Presidente is the local beer and it’s actually quite good!

Now, here’s the reality of the Dominican – They don’t care. Everything is very whatever. It doesn’t matter that our group of 22 had spent tens of thousands of dollars, they didn’t care if we had a problem. Here’s what the problem was – when we booked the vacation, we were very specific about a few things. Considering we were travelling with kids, elderly, wheelchairs and our family we needed some of the rooms to be ground floor, close proximity, next door etc. While I didn’t book it, my parents travel agent did and the instructions were very clear on what we needed – we got none of it. Our rooms were all over the place. 4 rooms were in a separate building, our rooms were on different floors and it was just a mess.

Trying to talk to Staff, They Don't Seem to Care

The family spent a couple hours with the front desk trying to remedy this nightmare, to no avail. They didn’t care. They had given our rooms away to others. I’ve learned that in the Dominican, it’s first come first serve.

So, my brother and I get our room key and we go to our room (a 15 minute walk from front desk). Keys don’t work. So we go back to the front desk (another 15 minute walk) and get new keys. We walk back to our room, (15 minutes) still don’t work. So we go back to front desk and tell them… ‘Oh it must be a problem with the door. I’ll send someone.’ How long? ‘Oh, 10 minutes.’ So we go back to our room, double time to meet the person to fix our door (7 minutes)…. 40 minutes later still no one. So walk back to the front desk, furious (15 minutes + exhausted/sweaty). Ask them what’s up, this time they actually radio someone… ‘It will be about 50 minutes.’ WHAT! Ugh. Grab a Cerveza, and 15 minutes back to the room to wait. Finally the guy comes and recodes the door.

“Just need to get new keys from the door and it will open.”

“Okay great. How long will that be till you’re back with the keys?”

“Oh, 15 or 20 minutes.”

“Gracias.”

20 minutes later, no keys… so another 15 minute walk to the front desk to get keys… and finally we’re in our room. At this point it’s about 8PM. We’ve been waiting 3.5 hours to get into our room. No one cares there. You can tip and they still didn’t seem to care. There’s more nightmare stories to tell about the rooms, but I’ll save it for the next blog post. In the meantime, here was the one great part of our room – the view.

Oh and morning Sunrises were incredible. Very different from the yellow, orange, red sunrises we get in Canada. I believe it has something to do with the equator and not having the curve of the earth affecting the sun? Probably also the ocean. Who knows… But morning sunrises were always very dark, and then very suddenly a light blueish colour, followed by this.

Again, this is the first day here… well, actually the first 18 hours. The remaining 7 days I’ll cover in the next two blog posts. So stay tuned!

Also, any similar experiences with All Inclusives not seeming to care?

For those who aren’t subscribed, Notable.ca has a newsletter that seemingly is sent out every 5 days with new content. It sometimes has interesting content, sometimes it does not. But what it does do is reminds me of their brand on a regular basis and because it’s not a newsletter packed full of bullshit, I tolerate receiving it so often. Well, that was until I received the latest issue on Monday. Here’s the headline…

My immediate reaction was one of complete frustration. Why the fuck are you all of a sudden selling out your email list to the highest bidder? When did I ever agree to receive some lame sponsored post? But I held my tongue. I realized that maybe the content was actually the same, but that just the title sponsor was there. Boy was I wrong. Instead of the usual Notable ‘You Should Note It’, I get this… and before I go to the image, here’s what it is… it’s an ad. That’s it. A fucking ad. No different than the “You BiggR PENi5 NOW!” emails that I get.

I’ve circled the main problems with this garbage (besides it being ‘Sponsored Love’)…

Gift… Notable has the fucking balls to think that sending me this is a gift. A gift… imagine for one second that your boyfriend or girlfriend said “Merry Christmas baby! I got you a coupon for 20% off!” I’d dump that chick.  Also, here’s the disgrace in this… RW&Co MANY TIMES offers 25%, 30% + 50% discounts. The exclusive is less than their standard discounts? How sad! (Source)

$85… I didn’t know there was an RW&Co and quite frankly, if you’re trying to get me to at least try your store, I’m not going to drop $85 on product. You want to get new clients? Don’t put a minimum! It’s a percentage not a set dollar figure.  If I spend $1 to get the discount, isn’t that better than me spending no dollars because $85 is too high?

Lastly, RW&Co… have you ever been in their stores? I hadn’t, so I checked it out because I didn’t want to write this without having at least been in their store… Notable?! You think RW&Co is Notable? RW&Co reminded me of a knock off H&M. Do you even know what Notable means?? “Notability is the property of being worthy of notice, having fame, or being considered to be of a high degree of interest, significance, or distinction.” RW&Co is not worthy of notice, it’s not famous and it’s certainly not something with a high degree of interest, significance or distinction.

Quite frankly Notable, this was the most ridiculous sponsored email I’ve received in a while. Good to know that Notable is just a name and not an actual principle with your company though.

Next up, Sponsored Love: Notable Members Only: Walmart has the Hottest Spring Fashions Ever!

PS. Having to wait a day (nevermind 2 weeks) to unsubscribe me from your list is a joke right?

So, for winning this contest I get a bunch of great Motorola gear along with the brand new Android based RAZR smartphone (one of my favourite flip phones in its former incarnation) and some cash… Over the next few months, I’ll naturally be doing some reviews on the various pieces of Motorola gear and my experiences with them. I’m such an Android lover, so thank god that the RAZR is using that operating system or I might be disappointed.

I want to thank @Motorola for hosting the contest and to everyone who may have voted for me. I also want to congratulate my fellow Canadian Social BLAZR @Listen2Lena and all the other competitors in the contest!

Oh and to the other Global Social BLAZRs:
United States: @cruiter + @missnormalee
Europe: @angelitama + @paulobrien
Singapore: @mellyandme + Ow Tai Zheng