Saturday, 18 March 2017 remains such an unforgettable day of my entire life on planet earth. It was the day I met @HelloJess and @JuanCh who flew in to Lagos for “Map Your World Week” event and it was also the day I first met @U-royFelixA, @EmekaUlor, @IsaacUnlimited, as well as 60+ Google Local Guides in Lagos. I was awestruck by some stats presented to us on that day and I couldn’t but make up my mind to become more committed, passionate and consistent with my contributions on Google Maps.
My first meet-up ever was the “Lagos Food Crawl” which was well attended and gave me so much confidence to hold several other meet-ups thereafter. Other meet-ups I’ve hosted are:
Hosting meet-ups has indeed been a huge blessing in disguise for me, given that I’m naturally an introvert fellow as well as a workaholic who spend most of his time (prior to becoming a passionate Google Local Guide) in front of laptop and indoor – all day. Meet-ups have allowed me to meet, engage and interact more with both people and even the city of Lagos I thought I knew so well.
GLOBALLY
Local Guides Summit 2017 (which was dubbed #BestSummitEver) was my first time ever of travelling outside Nigeria and first time of meeting @KarenVChin and @ermest as well as other Local Guides from across the globe.
Connect Live 2018 affords me the opportunity to meet both friends from Local Guides Summit 2017 and make new ones.
Whilst making plans to attend Connect Live 2019, I initially had the challenge of booking my flight for my preferred dates but thanks to @brittym who came to my rescue by offering me tips on avoiding scheduling my flights within the week of Thanksgiving. OMG!!! Her travel advice works like magic.
Although the flight schedule option I had comes with the challenge of a 5hr layover at Minneapolis−Saint Paul International Airport. However, the 5hr layover eventually turned out to be “a blessing in disguise” as I spent my time there moving round several parts of the airport and clicking my phone camera away which I later uploaded to Google Maps. One of the pictures I took there made it to first photo of Minneapolis−Saint Paul International Airport on Google Maps and singularly has 2,306,387 views (as at when I made this post).
On returning to Lagos from my Connect Live 2019 trip and whilst sharing tons of photos I took with my wife and 2 daughters, my 9yr old daughter made a remark and said: “My Dad now has friends all over the world”. What a profound statement that was – for me!
Right now, I look back at my journey as a Local Guide and I can boldly say that the Google Local Guides program has indeed been “a blessing in disguise” - transforming me from a computer nerd to one whose contributions on Google Maps is blessing others both locally and globally.
