Arrive a day early and join a pre-conference excursion to the Yakima Valley, Washington State’s oldest and largest wine growing region. This pre-conference excursion is hosted by Wine Yakima Valley. Stick around on Sunday and visit Washington State’s Red Mountain AVA. One of the state’s smaller AVA’s producing some of the state’s finest wines and grapes.

To register for either excursion or both simply let us know when you sign up for the Wine Bloggers Conference by clicking on REGISTER.

If you are one of the 70 participants that have already registered for the conference, email us at info @ winebloggersconference.org and let us know that you want to be on the bus too!

Pre-Conference Excursion to Yakima Valley

Date: Thursday, June 24th

Pick up: Richland, WA: 11:00 AM downtown or 11:30 AM at the Tri Cities airport in Pasco (code: PSC). This allows you to fly into the area directly either that morning or the night before. We will suggest a hotel in Richland where you can stay the night before or leave your vehicle if you have one.

Drop off: Walla Walla, WA: 6:30 PM at the Marcus Whitman Hotel – WBC Conference Location with a drop off in Richland before going to Walla Walla for those who are driving and want to take their car to Walla Walla.

Cost: $35 paid in advance includes local transportation, winery visits, and lunch

Wine Bloggers Conference 2010 in Walla Walla

Friday, June 25th: Starts at 11 AM

Saturday, June 26th: WBC!

Sunday, June 27th: Ends at Noon

Post Conference Excursion to Red Mountain AVA

Date: Sunday afternoon, June 27th

Pick up: Walla Walla, WA: 1:15 PM at the Marcus Whitman Hotel – WBC Conference Location and in Richland before continuing on to Red Mountain AVA for those who will be driving and dropping off a vehicle that day.

Drop off: Richland, WA: 8:00 PM at a downtown hotel. This allows you to either take a shuttle back to the Seattle airport, fly directly out of Pasco’s airport the next morning, or to get into your vehicle and drive from there.

Cost: $35 paid in advance includes local transportation, winery visits, and dinner.

For more information click on PRE & POST or send us an email.

Driving a car? No problem. For the pre-conference excursion you can park your car at the hotel in Richland and the bus will pick you up at 11 AM and then drop you off back at your car before it continues on to Walla Walla on Thursday, June 24th. For the post-conference excursion you can drive to the hotel in Richland after the conference, drop off your car, get on the bus, enjoy the Red Mountain AVA excursion, and then get dropped off at your car the evening of Sunday, June 27th at 8 PM.

You can make this even easier by simply leaving your car in Richland the entire weekend. Get on the bus at 11 AM on Thursday, June 24th and get off the bus at 8 PM on Sunday, June 27th.

Luggage? No problem. There is plenty of room on the bus for all your baggage and wine too!

Are you on the bus?

In the world of blogging, the community is in the drivers seat.  Now where is that more true then at the Wine Bloggers’ Conference.  We’ve opened the voting on session to be held on Sunday for bloggers.  We’re essentially looking to serve educational content and have people walk away with some actionable information.  The target for the sessions is both business and citizen wine bloggers.

We’re excited about the possibilities for sure but we know that there’s more the community would like to talk about then what we came up with!  So we’ve created a UserVoice.com forum for voting on the current topic ideas so we can gauge interest.  The GREAT thing about this is that you can add whatever suggestion you want to it and other can vote on your suggestion along with the current topics!

So head over to the forum and vote for your favorite today.  Once we narrow down the list we’ll take another vote (resetting the votes) to determine attendance and final logistics (larger, more popular sessions headed to the big rooms, etc…).

Get PUMPED!  WBC ’09 is on its way to California Wine Country!!

Here’s how the site works:

1. Click “Signup”
2. You can then use your email and create a password OR use any of the following logins – Facebook, Yahoo, OpenID, Google (GMail), MySpace, or AOL.
3. You can then vote up to 10 times on your favorite topics.

Thats it!  Thanks for your help in making this community conference a success!

OH!  And anytime you see the red “Feedback” tab on the side of the page you can go and vote and/or add topics (try it, its pretty sweet!).

Cheers!