Last week the Albuquerque Convention & Visitors Bureau hosted a media fam with about 25 freelance travel writers from around the country. A fam is short for familiarization and involves lots of trudging around from one visitor spot to another, with bouts of eating and drinking in between. I know hard work. But actually it is, the days are very long (10- 14 hours), and the media really are troopers about it.

This group stayed at the Sheraton Albuquerque Uptown (our client) and on Friday morning during the hotel’s presentation, were asked the question “How many of you know about Earth Hour?”.  Surprisingly few hands went up. So my client shared this video with them and let them know that on Saturday night at 8:30 pm, the hotel would be shutting off all non essential lights in the public areas and asking hotel guests to turn off their room lights and come downstairs and have a drink on the house, in the candlelight.

The hotel was sold out, so to ask every guest to participate was to expose a whole lot of people who probably knew nothing about Earth Hour to this global observance about climate change. We even convinced our client to do a 12second video. Sometimes I just have to toot a client’s horn. This was a very cool thing to do!

And just because it’s so great, here’s another great link to the night from the Boston Globe’s site. Worth a click. I can’t wait to see what happens next year. I think Earth Hour will really take off in the US in 2010.