Leave it to the AtAT staff to find themselves stuck in a former top-secret government bunker in West Virginia during one of the most inopportune three-day spans in recent Apple memory. One of those three days just happened to mark the grand opening of Apple's first retail stores, and another was the kickoff for the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Needless to say, a whole lotta relevant stuff happened while we were stranded without wireless 'net service in a facility fifty miles from the nearest EarthLink dialup node. When we recaptured our first taste of civilization during a brief layover in the Pittsburgh airport yesterday afternoon, we frantically OmniSkied like mad, devouring whatever info we could from every Mac news site available for a blissful twenty minutes. Passersby got to witness the terrifying yet fascinating spectacle of information junkies getting their first fix after an extended withdrawal.

Now, granted, West Virginia is a whole lot closer to McLean, Virginia than Boston is, and yes, we did consider renting a car and driving four hours each way to be present at Apple's first retail store on its first weekend of operation, but the logistics weren't pretty; given the realities of our schedule, we would have had only an hour at Tysons Corner in return for eight hours of chewing up highway. Would it have been worth it? Maybe; certainly it would have cut the length of our information withdrawal considerably, if we had really been able to soak up the retaily ambience of Apple's latest wacky scheme. But based on what we've been reading about the store openings, it sounds to us like we may not have even been able to set foot in the store with only an hour at our disposal.

While the official numbers released by Apple indicate that "over 7700 people" visited the company's first two stores during their first weekend of operation (and spent $599,000 during their pilgrimages), those stark facts don't tell the whole story. A MacCentral story on the grand opening of the Glendale store notes that an estimated 1500 people were waiting in line by the time Apple opened the doors, and it sounds like we may have had no better luck in McLean, where (according to a Daily Mac article) the wait may have been just as bad: "the line for the store reached approximately 300 ft. out to the main entrance [of the mall], then wrapped around the door for another half length by about 9:40 AM and steadily grew longer throughout the day." Plenty of people appear to have waited in line for three hours or longer before even crossing the threshold. So the odds are pretty good that we'd have spent eight hours driving for the privilege of standing in line for an hour and catching a glimpse of the front of the Apple Store from afar. (If you want a seriously visceral impression of how long the lines were, one fan has a very impressive QuickTime video up over at HomePage that shows the line at the Glendale store extending all the way out into the mall's parking garage. Yow! Take that, Gateway Country!)

So it's probably a good thing we didn't try to make the trip. Instead, now that we're back, we're content to soak up everyone else's accounts of the experience-- and Apple's expanded web coverage of its retail initiative is helping, too, with its QuickTime VR panorama and a video tour of the location-- complete with Steve playing the part of tour guide. Now we're not feeling so left out after all. By the way, off-topic memo to Steve: if you were planning on ever staying at the Greenbrier, you may want to reconsider. You can't even wear blue jeans in the main lobby, there's nothing even remotely vegan in any of the hotel restaurants (and there are dress codes in there, too), and the decor... dear sweet heaven, the decor. The picture doesn't do it justice. Let's just say that a man with taste and an appreciation for sleek, clean design such as yourself would likely need years of therapy to come to grips with the horrible sights that those walls contain. Pink and white wallpaper, bright green carpeting, and floral-print curtains? Consider yourself warned. The Apple Store it ain't.