Day 1

After a great flight from Burbank to Salt Lake on Jet Blue—btw: huge fan of Jet Blue b/c directv with a personal screen for each passenger, great leg room, easy boarding and deplaning and quick luggage—where we landed in 12 degree weather. Our group of about 10 guys waited for a few others from NYC to get in and then we loaded up a ‘church van’ and left for our houses. Two families are playing host to our group of 14 this year. My family are two elderly folks who have a beautiful multi-bedroom with the requisite mountain chalet-style decorations such as antique brooms, leather snowshoes and Thomas Kinkaid lake scenes on the wall.

We arrived a bit late but some guys still had business to take care of in town (we are about 20 minutes away from the festival) and the rest of us stayed behind and watched a great match from the Australian Open and talked about wives (theirs) and writing movies, the strike, television trends, etc. It was really fun conversation and I loved getting the perspective of these Christians in the industry and seeing how they were able to have a family and not be millionaires. That’s very encouraging to me and I was left with a great excitement about the next few days of living with these guys, seeing movies, talking about those movies and getting to know other Christian artists.