I was at the Oct 20 RSC in Torrance. Parts of it were great, other parts.... not so much. The first two days were Tim Tucker speaking about stuff that I, as a CPL (H) was already quite familiar with. The nice thing about how it was laid out was that it made more sense for my CFI book I'm putting together. We had one of the maintenance guys for the third day. That was pretty informative, actually. That day gave me a bit more info as to why I should check what I'm checking and what other stuff I should look for that wasn't on my preflight checklist.
The last day gets a paragraph all to itself. Bob Muse did our last bit of Safety Course, and I think he drilled the "safety" part of Safety Course into my head more so than anyone else. It wasn't what he covered so much as how he covered it. "Failure to plan is a planned failure" was the mantra he drilled into my head. Essentially, know the POH, know the EP's, recognize the symptoms, but know that certain scenarios will come up where you might want to end up doing something differently.
My main gripe about the Safety Course is that they didn't go more in-depth into the mx side. I'm fairly comfortable with the aerodynamics of VRS or an autorotation, etc. What I'm not as comfortable with is how the innards of the robbie work. I'd love to take the Mx Safety Course, but I'm not an A&P and have no plans on becoming one. I'd just like to be intimately familiar with the helicopter I'll be flying for the next 1000 hours.
I stayed at the Ramada, which was convenient for the course, but not really so for sightseeing unless you want to limit yourself to Hermosa Beach. Rent a car, have GPS and bring a laptop with wifi if you're going to stay at the Ramada. Wifi was spotty at best through their server. There's a starbucks 2-3 blocks west on crenshaw that I ended up using (both as an early morning hangover cure and a wifi spot) because I couldn't get wifi in my room.