Monday, July 22, 2013

Well, I survived another Historicon...

   So Historicon 2013 is in the books now. For the record, the trip out was fine (though a bit early) and the convention was a blast. I do feel sorry for Zach's eardrums overnight, as my snoring is... monumental. As in, pounds on the wee little eardrum like an orchestral tympani. I did warn him.

   I'm going to break my Historicon blogs up into three parts, including this one. The other two posts will be regarding the games I played and the multitude of purchases.

   I liked the Fredericksburg venue. It is not the easiest place to get to from an airport, but the town itself was quite nice. They have a good game store in town as well, and I will be writing up a report on it this week. Plenty of food options around town. We ate at Aladdin, a local Greek/Mediterranean sort of place twice, and at Friday's chain twice. Most of the rest of our meals were taken at the convention center, and were pretty decent for that sort of fare, and even semi-reasonably priced, considering the captive audience factor. The building itself was big enough, clean, and nice. Plenty of restroom space (they opened one of the ladies' rooms to the gents, considering the imbalance in gender over the weekend, I thought it a wise decision). Air conditioning worked fine, even through the "heat wave" last week - something other venues have lacked.

   There were a lot of vendors there, and most of the vendor space was taken up. Nic, of Eureka Miniatures, did not make it over from Australia, unfortunately. That's a shame, because he is one of the nicest guys there. I also missed Cor-Sec Engineering, who was supposed to have a booth, but apparently had some sort of trouble in getting to the show. That was a pity because I wanted very much to see one of his ocean mats. Some of the big guys were not there (no Old Glory), but there were quite a few smaller companies well-represented.

   We stayed at the Best Western, which was about three miles away by car, just the other side of I-95 from the venue. It was clean, the beds were pretty comfortable, and the shower was hot. The food at the free breakfast was okay, if nothing spectacular. All in all, not a bad stay.

   Traffic returning to Baltimore for my flight on Sunday night was only bad once I got near the airport. My flight was delayed for two hours, and I was already early because I had accounted for worse traffic than I encountered. To eat up some of the five hours until my flight, I went to the movies and saw Pacific Rim. Pretty good kaiju movie. Went to return my Dollar rental, and they tried to charge me an extra day's fare. Got that sorted out (no, I didn't have to pay it). Plane was even later, and finally boarded at about midnight instead of leaving at 9:20. Then there was a mechanical problem with the plane. We didn't take off until almost 1:00 local time, arriving in Houston at almost 3:00 AM. Yuk.

Look for more soon, probably tomorrow...

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