It was simple. I told my boss I’d be off September 1st to the 4th. The wife request off the weekend from work (a year ago). We’d be off, come down to the Con on Friday, get our room first thing and spend four glorious days among the freaks, finally heading back to our regularly scheduled lives on Tuesday.
Wrong.
She didn’t get the day off. So she’s working until 12. Fine, she’ll drive down after work. But then I have work to do in the morning too. So I’ll be a little late. By noon, I’m just finishing up. She comes home instead and we drive down together.
We check in to the room, which is supposed to be right next to the rooms of two friends, we reserved as one and were assured a block of rooms. When we ask if its possible to switch from the two double beds to a single king, we are told that doing so will split us from the group. Well, if we are with the group we can suffer. Only, after we get up to the 28th floor, we learn one group of friends is on 23, and the other is on 35. Back down in the lobby, I complain and get our room switched. We are up on 40 now, much better view, and the king beds are nicer than the doubles for sharing. But… unlike last year’s room we have no fridge and no microwave, and the couch has been replaced by a single comfy chair.
Whatever, its fine. So we head to registration. Its in the Hyatt. There are signs. We follow the signs. At registration we are told that you have to enter from Baker Street, from outside, this is exit only. None of the signs leading us here mentioned that. But we go outside and eventually find the one sign that says it is the registration entrance.
By the time she got home, we load the car, drove downtown, checked in, twice, and registered, its 6. We hooked up with some other friends for a snack and plan to start catching panels at 7. Nothing starts that we want to see until 8:30, at least nothing that we didn’t miss completely. To pass the time until then we go try to find the people we were supposed to be rooming next door to.
They are at Wrestling.
Of all the things you expect to find at a Sci-Fi and Fantasy convension, wrestling isn’t one of them. But its funny. Some of the guys aren’t bad at the acting, some are horrible. Everyone gets into it and is yelling and laughing and screaming.
When that’s done, we stand out in the halls and watch the costumes stroll by. Some people have made excellent costumes, some people… haven’t. Pictures will come eventually.
Pretty much nothing went according to plan the first day, but once we got here it was fun. Hopefully the rest of the weekend will be more of that and less of the other stuff.