mandolin | G2007 Report, part 1

Okay, I'm going to take a crack at my G2007 con journal NOW rather than wait on it. Since I didn't have much of a brain for remembering quotes, and because I came back to work to find a landslide (and a retirement party/excuse to play volleyball after lunch, thank GOD), this might be less verbose and rambling than usual.

...oh, what am I saying? But I'll try to be concise.

A quick preface

I'm going to preface this journal with a note: I have been woefully MIA from the Gargoyles fandom since 2004, ever since my 2003 TGS burnout. Since this was my first and oldest real fandom, I've regretted that for a while now (hence my attempts to keep coming to cons), and since I've been MIA from fandom in general lately, I decided this year that I'm going to try to rectify that. I don't see myself jumping in feet first and spamming the Station 8 Gargoyles boards all of a sudden, I'm still going to keep out of fandom drama as much as possible, but I need to get involved again. I've made some great friends through this fandom, and that alone is reason to stick my head in from time to time. So I headed down to G2007 with that thought in mind: get involved with the fandom again.

Oh, and for those not in the know, Carmine is the shoulder dragon puppet I got at the PA Ren Faire last fall.

Thursday, June 21, 2007: Preparing for takeoff

Since it was a lot cheaper for Shaun (

brooklynx) to fly into BWI than it would be for him to fly into Knoxville (and flying into Nashville wouldn't work because he'd still have to drive four hours across the state), we arranged for him to fly in on Wednesday night and spend the night at my place. Wednesday night was largely uneventful in spite of the airline taking FOREVER with the baggage claim - seriously, it was slow even by BWI standards - and we got food for the coolers, looked over the map, played around with our laptops and watched Hellboy: Blood and Iron (and like good Gargs fans were immediately pinged by Cree Summer's voice). That was pretty much it.

Shaun was still on Pacific time, so I got up around 8:30 and decided to change and pack as much of my stuff as I could before waking him around 9. We made sandwiches and dithered over whether or not to bring our laptops and decided we did NOT trust the hotel enough to do so due to the lack of room safes. I still brought Carmine on the grounds that he was unique enough not to be an easy "steal me!" item nor would he be easy for a thief to hide. We packed up the car and headed out around 11 am. I couldn't find one of my wrist braces, so when we hit Frederick I stopped at Doug and Deb's in the hopes I'd left it there. No dice (pun intended), but I did retrieve my set of D&D dice I left there.

The Frederick and Ellicott City stops and a bottleneck at the Harpers Ferry bridge slowed us up a bit - one lane was open, so we waited for half an hour to cross the Potomac. Aside from that, there was no real difficulty getting to Pigeon Forge. I will note that I booed and hissed when we passed the Emory & Henry College exit on

alex_garg's behalf; I would have given the finger, but didn't want any of the truckers to think I was flipping them and not the exit off. Shaun took over the middle three hours of the drive, which was a big help because it allowed my headache to go away.

We made it into Pigeon Forge around 8:30 that night. Pigeon Forge is like Dollywood's own personal driveway - the main drag is trying to be Vegas meets Myrtle Beach meets Cheyenne, WY in the middle of Frontier Days. People were braking randomly in between blocks just to gawp at all the flashy distractions on both sides of the road; we nearly got hit by someone gawking at the Jurassic Jungle Ride and nearly missed the turn for the hotel because of everything on the strip. I met Kathy in the lobby, got the other key to the room, and since Shaun's roommates weren't there he crashed with us that first night. As I would discover later, we had an incredibly convenient room: right across from the (non-frightening) elevators and from the stairwell that connected the convention rooms.

When we moved the car over to a more convenient side of the hotel, we encountered Gorebash just getting in. Gore had driven down as well - straight from Massachusetts. He left around 4 am. I told him he was insane and that I was duly impressed. I could never do that.

After unpacking (and discovering that the missing brace was IN MY BAG), I shouldered Carmine and we went to explore. We ran into Thom, Greg, Jen and ~~my handwriting is unintelligible here~~ others in the lobby, and then went outside and found the Walgreens a block away. We stocked up, Carmine got a lot of attention from the cashier, and headed back to the room. I was so tired that I passed out before 10:30 pm; Shaun was still watching Whose Line? and Kathy hadn't come back yet when I conked out.

More later.