Percy's Travels: Omaha, NE - Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting (over the years)

This is what you see when you arrive at the airport in Omaha. Yup, I guess that goodlooking young fellow turned out alright!

What? No way, that's not photoshop...

Well, here we go again! I started my 2015 trip off at the annual shareholder meeting for Berkshire Hathaway. We departed for Omaha on May 1, 2015 and Lisa and I left for Istanbul on May 3 (Amps & Iris went home to Vancouver). Every year, the Berkshire shareholder meeting is a little different. Instead of going back in time and doing a separate post for each one, I thought I might do a quick post to show a snapshot across the years of our trips to Omaha and maybe answer the #1 question I get every time I tell people I'm doing this - why do you keep going to Nebraska???

hahaha it seems that I've used my arm to strategically block the year on the poster...

Every bit of Heinz ketchup is another penny in Berkshire's wallet. Don't be shy, put it on your fries folks!

Enjoying the NetJets display jet at the annual meeting (and proudly rocking the 50th year shareholder pass)

The meeting:

You can check the Berkshire Hathaway website for all the information you would want on the annual shareholders' meeting (and the next one)
It always takes place on the first weekend of May each year. There is a big shareholder shopping day on the Friday and some activities on the Sunday (including a 5K run, a shopping day, and dinner at a steakhouse), but we usually only manage to make it to the Saturday activities.
I've attended this meeting three times now (2011, 2014, and 2015) and each year the theme is different, but the overall format on the Saturday (the focus of the weekend) remains the same:

We wake up and line up outside Centurylink Center to get in at an ungodly early hour,
run (sorry, walk briskly!) in at 7 am when the doors open to a hockey/basketball arena to snag four seats with a great view of the stage at the front,
watch the opening video at 8:30 (no clips that I can show since you're not allowed to record, but suffice to say it's awesome),
6 hours of an 84 year old and a 91 year old answering questions on a wide variety of topics (anything you can think of) from an adoring audience,
about 30 minutes of formal business matters,
and shopping at various businesses owned by Berkshire throughout the day

For this weekend, the hotels in Omaha are expensive and have minimum night restrictions, and the flights in and out of Omaha are expensive (and surprisingly time-consuming out of YVR), but I can't begrudge them any of that - if you're going to a weekend that's nicknamed the "Woodstock for Capitalists", you better be prepared to pay for the privilege.
So after all of that, I suppose I still haven't answered the question of why I go through the trouble and expense of doing this year after year. The reason is... because those 6 hours of Q&A are too good to miss! Look, I don't have to convince you. 40,000 people make this pilgrimage every year. The people in line behind me flew in from Singapore just for this weekend!

Lining up at 6 in the morning for our shareholder credentials

Look at that lineup in front of us. To clarify, the doors you enter through are not the ones you see in this shot, but are actually around the corner. Wow... maybe we'll need to get there at 5 am next year :(

Once we get inside, this is what the stadium looks like. Pure pandemonium!

Packed. The stated capacity of Centurylink Center in Omaha is around 17,500. It's estimated that 40,000 people came to the 2015 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Just imagine this - some people flew out to Omaha just for this weekend and ended up having to sit in the overflow rooms at the hotel across the street (they didn't even get to see Warren and Charlie with their own eyes).

What we eat:

So far, our favourite restaurant is the Grey Plume. You can expect me to be back next year.
Maybe I'm too used to Gotham's and Hy's, but the steakhouses I've been to in Omaha so far have been disappointing (I know, first world problems). I guess I'll have to keep trying!

Fries (fried in duck fat) with a fried goose egg on top. Delicious!

Classy charcuterie plate. Whoa, are we turning into adults???

aww yiss, pork done three ways (plus the sausages too)

and chocolate for dessert. any questions?

What there is to do:

So... we haven't done very well in this area. Maybe it's due to our age (the under 30 set is well under-represented in Omaha on this weekend), but we've struggled to find other forms of entertainment outside of the shareholder meeting. So far, I can recommend the movie theatre (it's cheaper to watch movies in Omaha than it is in Vancouver, and the theatres are less crowded) and the gun range (it's much cheaper than back home in Canada, and the approach of "here's your gun and a pile of bullets, enjoy learning how to operate your firearm" was fun for me, though I can appreciate how some others may not enjoy it quite as much).