1. Medical tape – preventing blisters from costume shoes. (Also, repairs in a pinch)
2. Extra lanyard for your camera
3. Umbrella for outdoor lines
4. Costume-appropriate bag
5. Insoles – you’ll be walking a LOT
6. Burt’s Bees Res-Q Ointment for sunburn in case your sunscreen wears off or otherwise fails
7. Safety pins
8. Reliable writing surface (in case you have paper but not a notebook)
9. Napkins or paper towels (especially if you’re bringing your own food)
10. Extra shirt to go over tank tops to prevent sunburn or backpack friction

Read more Tips for Comic-Con.

It’s located on the bay (of course), near the San Diego Maritime Museum where they have several classic ships permanently anchored and available for tours. If you happen to have an upper-floor room, the views are quite nice. (We were on the second floor, so our view was of the roof of the hotel’s conference center. It’s funny how quickly we got used to the sound of the air conditioner.)

It’s an easy walk to Little Italy (we went out to one of our favorite San Diego restaurants, Indigo Grill, on Wednesday) or the trolley, and on the convention shuttle route.

The rooms were nice, clean and spacious (absolutely huge, compared to the last few places we’ve stayed in San Diego). The bed was comfortable, and they had pillows with two different levels of firmness, so neither of us had any trouble getting to sleep. The hotel restaurant/pub, the Elephant and Castle, is quite good. There’s also a Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in one tower, and a deli next door. And for those looking to save money on breakfast, the in-room coffee service is a single-cup disposable-basket setup, so that if you want plain hot water for tea or oatmeal, it won’t taste like coffee! Wireless internet access is complimentary, and easy to set up. Our room had locked doors to adjoining rooms on both sides, so a large group could presumably link together at least three rooms into a suite.

The only annoyances were:

Internet access during the convention was absolutely swamped. Sometimes pages just wouldn’t load, and the Flickr uploader actually gave up several times. This would have been less of a problem if I hadn’t been so determined to post photos and blog during the con, though at least with photos it turned out I could (usually) start them before going to bed and let them run overnight. The one night that it just gave up, I tried when we got up at 6 AM and they posted extremely quickly.

The bathroom had a sliding door that didn’t seal. Like the room at the Omni, it blocked light but not sound or airflow. On the plus side, it was actually big enough that we could brush our teeth at the same time.

Overall, though, we really liked it, and agreed that it would be near the top of our list when it came to hotels on the shuttle route. Though if possible I’d really prefer something close enough that we wouldn’t have to rely on the shuttle or other transportation.

Historic San Diego

We drove down after lunch on Saturday and hit Old Town San Diego on the way in. (More Highlander Grog!) I could swear I don’t remember having trouble finding it before, but the last few times it’s been hard to get to even following a map. At least we managed better than we did in December, when we ended up several miles inland before we could find a place to cross the inlet.

I don’t remember much going on the last time we were there, but this time Old Town was in full-on living history mode, complete with tour guides dressed up in 1800s outfits and a horse-and-buggy ride.

I’d booked the Courtyard San Diego Downtown because it’s literally next door to the House of Blues. It took a while to negotiate the one-way streets, but once we arrived, we stepped inside and were blown away by the lobby. It turns out that the hotel used to be the building for the San Diego Trust & Savings bank. After the bank closed in the 1990s, Marriott bought it and converted it to a hotel. The vault, safe deposit rooms, and other rooms on the first floor became a conference center, and the offices on the upper floors became guest rooms. They’ve preserved as much of the old look of the place as possible, down to keeping the mail slots on the former office doors. (Don’t worry, they’re blocked.)

We ate dinner at Chopahn (6th Ave. near F St.), an Afghan restaurant we first visited during last year’s Comic-Con. It was empty when we got there, which I hope was just because we were there on the early side, because the food is great. Another couple arrived while we were eating, but they were the only people we saw other than the waitress. She had started pushing tables together as if they were expecting a larger party later on.

After dinner we wandered the Gaslamp district for a while. I kept making notes of where various hotels or restaurants were located. Eventually I realized I was basically scouting for Comic-Con next month.

Around 7:00 we made our way to the House of Blues.

Concert

That’s when we discovered that we’d been under a misapprehension about the nature of the venue. The only House of Blues we’d been to before was the one in Anaheim at Downtown Disney. It’s a big room with a stage, a balcony, and bars around the edges. I expect the main hall here was probably the same, but Butterfly Boucher was playing the “small room.” I assumed that meant a smaller room of the same type, but really it meant there was an 8-foot-wide stage in the dining area of the bar (the “Voodoo Stage”). Which would have been great if we hadn’t just had a huge dinner. So we ordered drinks, sat and talked, and eventually ordered some sweet potato fries and nibbled.

Note for next time: Arrive at the printed time, grab a table and order dinner there.

From the back of the stage to the edge of the bar can’t have been larger than our living room, and we don’t have a very big living room. It was like listening to someone play at a coffee house, only with better acoustics and most of the people were there to hear them sing. It was a huge contrast to the last time we saw Butterfly Boucher live, from the top section of what was then the Arrowhead Pond (primarily a hockey stadium).

The first opening act, Dawn Mitschele, played a half-hour set starting at 8:00, and the second, Derek Evans, started after about a ten-minute break. They both had a more country-folk sound, which kind of surprised me, since Butterfly Boucher is more rock. They’re both locals, and I wondered whether they might be following her up to LA.

All through the evening, teenagers in formal wear would come walking down the hall past the stage. It turned out that a high school was holding its prom in the main room at the House of Blues. At one point one woman in the audience (of two who did quite a bit of dancing later on) shouted out, “Hello prom people!”

Butterfly (yes, that is her real name) came out around 9:30, spent a few minutes setting up her equipment (including the loop pedal she jokingly referred to as her backup band) and tuning her guitar, then launched into about an hour-long set of music mostly from the new album — though she did break into “Another White Dash” (with an audience participation section) and “I Can’t Make Me” in the middle.

She clearly hadn’t expected to do an encore, but we all kept applauding, and she came back out to sing “Life is Short,” explaining that she hadn’t rehearsed it in over six months and might need help on the lyrics…

After the show we waited in line to meet her, bought a copy of the CD which she signed, talked to her for a few minutes and posed with her for a photo.

Nightlife

After the meet-and-greet, we headed down to the Ghirardelli shop. Ever since the one in South Coast Plaza closed, I have this thing where if I’m in a city with a Ghirardelli store, I have to go there. Neither of us was up for dessert, but they do have a wider selection of their chocolate than you can find in the grocery store.

As typical for a Saturday night, 5th Avenue was absolutely packed with people of all ages and levels of dress going to and from clubs, bars, and restaurants. We dodged over to 6th street on the way back up, but even then ran into a huge crowd around Sin Niteclub [sic] and the Double Deuce. Through the latter bar’s windows we could see a guy trying to ride a mechanical bull. Some of the women we saw walking around had given up on their shoes and were barefoot. Though walking barefoot on the streets of any major city doesn’t sound like a great idea, no matter how much your feet hurt. Eventually we made it back to the hotel.

Sunday Morning

Cafe 222 (2nd Ave. and Island) has quickly become one of our standard spots for breakfast in San Diego, at least when we’re staying downtown. Afterward we hit the farmer’s market (every Sunday morning at 3rd Ave. and J St. — take note, Comic-Con attendees) where we picked up some blueberries and cherries to bring home. Nothing much in the way of stores were open yet, and we had make it up to the LA area for lunch, so we checked out, made another quick stop at Old Town to look for a store we’d stumbled on last December, and got back on the road.

More photos at Flickr, mostly Old Town and some weird stuff in the Gaslamp area.

I’ve been posting old photos to Flickr lately, including some shots from a couple of trips to Las Vegas.

Like this shot of the Flying Saucer Mall — excuse me, the Fashion Show Mall. (I got the initials right!)

Seriously, doesn’t that view just say, “The visitors have landed?”

Maybe they’ll want some Alien Fresh Jerky.

It makes me want to headdesk.

Now, I don’t hate Vegas. I’m not ZOMG in love with it, but I’ve been there more than once and I don’t think it should be removed from the face of the earth. What I believe about Vegas is that it is a law and a destination unto itself, and that everyone should be able to choose whether they go based on the merits of the place, not on the merits of what else might be going on there that isn’t a usual part of the location. Please keep this in mind as I present my list of Reasons Not to Move CCI to Las Vegas:

1. Weather. San Diego may be incredibly hot some years, but it’s coastal. There are breezes a lot of the time, and it’s often quite bearable. Vegas is inland desert and is 99% guaranteed to be nasty hot in July/August. Part of the crazy fun of CCI is seeing costumes on the street, which would become darn near impossible for a lot of people given the temperature.

2. Distance. I’m not talking about the distance for people to get there (though I will in a bit), but the distance between things. It can take over half an hour to get from the front door of one hotel to the front door of the next one over. In San Diego, it’s pretty easy to leave the convention center, go find food that’s not jacked up in price for an inferior product, and come back. In Vegas, unless you take the monorail, that’s a pipe dream, especially given that the convention center is off the Strip and not really near a lot of hotels. Keep reading for more.

3. No public transportation. Well, not NO transportation. There’s the monorail, and there are buses. But the monorail only goes down one side of the Strip, and the traffic on the Strip itself, where the buses run, is a nightmare 24/7. The monorail is not convenient to get to; it runs down the backs of the hotels, and getting to the stations from the street, or vice versa, can take 20 minutes just by itself. (We timed.) Lots of hotels do have shuttle service, but it’s not huge, it’s not universal, and it’s not fantastic. Based on the masses of humanity I’ve seen at the SD Old Town trolley station, I doubt the monorail has enough cars to pack the schedule as full as they’d need to, and I doubt the shuttles will satisfy fans wanting to get to places at specific times. There would need to be charter buses, the way SD does it, but because this is Vegas, they would want either tickets or tips…probably both. Which brings me to:

4. Pay For Play. In Vegas, the dollar is still almighty. You can get a hotel room for $50 a night if you play it right, sure, but you don’t get the perks that identify you to the hotel’s amenities providers as a Good Customer. In some places, if you just want people to be polite to you, you have to pay them. In others, you just get dirty looks if you don’t tip. It’s been said that CCI wouldn’t make a dent in the normal daily Vegas people-traffic; if that’s true, then we’d all be running into this. Think it’s maddening to get slow service because a restaurant in the Gaslamp is full, or because you think you’ve been pegged as a low tipper? Try being in Vegas where they know whether you have spare change. Doesn’t matter if the place has only two parties in the section; if one of them is a Vegas regular and has paid to be part of their Premier Club, he’ll always get better service than the other party. I’m imagining the cheaper hotel restaurants being overrun with congoers who don’t understand the ethos (if you can even call it that); the saddest part is that if they voice any displeasure, they simply won’t be heard because all that’s happened is that they’ve run into how Vegas deals with those they perceive as cheapskates. They discourage you from coming back until you’re ready to spend. And,

5. Everything costs more. More accurately, it’s a case of the substandard being cheaper and the quality merchandise being more expensive. You can get a lot of pure crap for very little money, but you have to be willing to accept really crappy crap. Most stores are either souvenir dives or designer boutiques. I’d bet even the toothbrushes in most of the dives are emblazoned with “LAS VEGAS.”

And the food. Every megahotel in the vicinity of the Strip has a restaurant hierarchy. There is at least one posh place, one just a bit below it, one just a bit below that, a buffet, a theme bar, and a taco/burger/coffee stand. Most of the “nice” restaurants in SD are comparable in price to the lowest-price nice places in Vegas, and there aren’t nearly as many tony upscale spots. Not only that, but the cheap places are much greater in number in SD, and easier to get to (see #2 and 3 above). If there are more restaurants in a megahotel, there is usually a theme place that may be either very posh or very casual, followed by a doubling of one of the lower-priced ranks. They’ll also have bars around the casino floor(s), and occasionally a cookie or ice-cream shop. If the hotel is not a new “mega” type, they’ll have a coffee shop and a nice place, and some coffee/ice cream/burgers. The Stratosphere is the best for cheap eats, but it’s not close to anything. (The biggest souvenir shop in the city doesn’t count.) And at the other end of the Strip, the MGM Grand isn’t bad for it either, though their counter service is tucked away into the winding halls at the back of the place. Sure, there’s fast food dotted around here and there, but chances are that you’re not going to want to make the 45-minute trek to the McDonald’s when you can go a monorail stop away and find the cheap food in the hotels on the monorail line. Which will be mobbed, because nobody’s going to want to take the time to hike across the street and hunt through a megahotel for something they can afford.

Actually, there is one thing that doesn’t cost more: alcohol. Three guesses why.

6. No commuting. To those who come in from, say, Virginia, this may not sound like a big deal. But it’s just plain fact: there are fewer people living within 2 hours’ drive of Vegas than within 2 hours’ drive of SD. With the con in SD, people can even stay with friends (or in cheaper hotels) in LA, OC, or even Riverside, and take a train or other mass conveyance into town for the con. Not so easy in Vegas. Which means that a lot more people would be staying in town, filling up services and probably driving up hotel prices out of sheer demand. Another consideration: Hollywood is not close enough to Vegas for big-name stars to come out by bus for just one day. There’d have to be planes involved, or hotel stays; and with the way insurance works, the cost might be too great for the perceived benefit…especially considering how many lowlifes decide it’s their right and privilege to post exclusive footage to YouTube five minutes after it’s been aired. Dragon*Con suggests that there would still be plenty of star power, but such things as bringing in large portions of new movies’ casts might become much less feasible.

In the interest of fairness, there are a few reasons Vegas would be superior to SD for a giant con of any type:

1A. Parking. Vegas has parking. Acres of it, all over the place, for a lot less than you pay in SD. Anyone driving in would be able to park, for as long as they wanted, probably even wherever they wanted. Then again, #6 above might mean fewer people wanting to park in the first place.

2A. More floor space. The LVCC has nearly four times the floor space of the SD facility. To someone who’s been stuck in foot traffic on the floor at least once every year, this sounds like absolute heaven. Even if the con used only half the floor space available, prospects might be a little brighter for those of us slogging through the whole thing. On the flip side, they don’t have much more in the way of meeting room space; chances are, there’d be a bunch of exhibit space being used as the equivalent of Ballroom 20 and the 6A-F rooms. I’m not sure from the floor plan whether any of the large floor divisions is set up to be the equivalent of Hall H; I may need MeetingMatrix to find out. (Because only a meeting planner could ever possibly have a legitimate desire to know the details of the center.) Also, there are multiple small convention/event centers in Vegas; one of these could easily be used for, say, an exclusive screening of something at night. Ticket sales for 12,000 seats in the Mandalay Bay center would probably cover the rental cost and the rights, with some left over for the Cause of the Day.

3A. More hotel rooms. The Vegas visitor site boasts “over 140,000 hotel rooms,” which sounds fantastic. Throw in the fact that many congoers share rooms, and you have a recipe for much easier reservations than can be had in SD. Downside: the same room can vary in price by as much as $300 from Tuesday to Friday night, so you can bet they’ll be picking a more middling point on their scale for con-block reservations. And this is Vegas, so see #5 above. They’re going to do everything in their power to be sure their Premier Club regulars are able to get rooms if they want them.

If Las Vegas wants CCI, it’s in the way Irvine wants a university: they want the benefits without having the necessary people around. Congoers for CCI, by and large, are not well-heeled yuppies with expense accounts, and we are not there to spend our money at the blackjack tables. The Vegas I know is not enthusiastic about our kind of congoer overrunning its streets and its bars, and it has a much higher threshold for good financial behavior than San Diego—where we already fall short. Let’s do ourselves a favor and start looking for better solutions to the crunch.

Note: If you want to skip straight to the photos, head over to my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set on Flickr.

Originally we’d planned to only go to the convention on Saturday, and pre-ordered one-day tickets. Then WonderCon published their schedule, and most of the stuff we wanted to see turned out to be on Friday. So we juggled our schedule around, and bought a second set of one-day tickets.

On the plus side, it ended up being slightly cheaper than getting three-day tickets and not using them all three days (which is what we did last year). On the minus side, it meant we had to pick up our badges twice. (I asked on Friday whether we could pick up both badges at once. We couldn’t.)

Day 5 (Feb 28): Saturday at WonderCon

The crowds outside were slightly bigger, but I don’t think we had much of a line, since we arrived about an hour after the floor opened. The first real hint of fandom was a group of people dressed as Jedi and a pair of life-sized R2D2 robots on the mezzanine. Then another group of people dressed based on what I assume was an anime or video game. Then we were down the escalator, across the hall, and walking to pick up our badges again.

Costumes

While we were still getting our badges ready, we spotted a trio of women in Battlestar Galactica costumes. Katie leaned over to me and said, “Isn’t that a Six?” and then one of us realized that the two with her were dressed as Starbuck and Boomer/Athena.

There were a lot more people in costumes on Saturday. If last year’s big theme was G.I. Joe, this year it was clearly Watchmen. I remember seeing the occasional Rorschach at cons a few years ago, but this year they seemed to be all over the place. I saw at least two Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectres as well (one with a somewhat more modest costume), at least one Comedian, a Laurie Silk Spectre and even a Doctor Manhattan (a brave soul who had painted himself blue and walked around in a bald cap and a speedo). The weird (or perhaps not so weird when you think about it) thing is: They were all based on the movie versions of the costumes.

I have a lot more cosplay photos up at my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set.

The Main Floor

Actually, there were a lot more people on Saturday, period. I ended up skipping the DC booth swag line, because it was at least four times as long and not noticeably moving when I walked by. It was made worse by running past the gaming area and, as near as I could tell, through an area where the 501st Legion (or perhaps another Star Wars fan group) seemed to be doing photo ops. Speaking of which, it’s weird: 10 years ago, someone with a Star Wars Stormtrooper costume was impressive. These days, they’re so common that I hardly even notice them.

The autograph area in particular was very crowded, partly because they had big names like Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. I don’t think I ever had to resort to shuffling on Friday, but it happened a lot on Saturday.

In many ways, WonderCon resembles San Diego Comic-Con before it went insane. Actually, I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to attend a comic/pop culture convention in California, but has gotten sick of the crowds and the hotel rush and the lines and not being able to get into the events you want and everything that has made Comic-Con International so frustrating over the last few years.

What I did find frustrating about this year’s WonderCon, though, was that several people I would have liked to meet (or at least hear speak at a panel) ended up not coming because MegaCon was the same weekend. I’m not sure, but I suspect there was a regional divide, with most west-coast people going to San Francisco, and most east-coast people heading to Orlando, Florida instead. Ultimately I only added two signatures to Comic Book Tattoo, and no one involved with Flash: Rebirth was there at all.

Panels

The only panel I really wanted to make sure I attended was the DC Universe panel, though it was more a matter of obligation (Speed Force). It turned out to be mostly rehashing the previous day’s DC Nation panel. I will say one thing for Dan Didio: he certainly brings energy to the room for his panels. I expect I probably would have paid a lot more attention instead of using my phone to read about the scans_daily meltdown.

Katie caught a writing workshop run by David Gerrold, which she found quite helpful, and got into the giant room for Star Trek.

Now, the Esplanade Ballroom never managed to be as tough as the infamous Hall H in San Diego…but Star Trek was absolutely packed. Everyone’s seen the latest trailer by now, but it premiered at this panel, and Katie remarked afterward that it was the first trailer that made the movie actually look interesting, like it had an actual story and not just a bunch of ships blowing up. On the downside, no one asked Zoe Saldana any questions during the Q&A period — they were all directed to Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto.

The plan, originally, was for me to catch up with the panel for 9 in the same room. I made it about halfway through, because of the crowd issue. It wasn’t that there were no seats. It was that five million people (well, it seemed like it) left the room after Star Trek, and after crossing that torrent, I had to ind the line…and trace the line to the end. That turned out to be out the front door and down along the entire side of the convention center almost to the very back. It stayed still for a few minutes, then started moving more-or-less smoothly. As I made it up to the doors, a woman handling crowd control assured us, “There’s plenty of room, they all left after Star Trek because they’re crazy.” There was no hope of figuring out where Katie was sitting (quite near the front, as it turned out, since she got to move up when so many people left between panels), so I just grabbed an empty chair near the end of an aisle.

Anyway, Nine was just Elijah Wood and animation director Joe Ksander talking about making the film and occasionally showing clips. Someone asked Elijah Wood to compare his character to Frodo Baggins, and he remarked something along the lines of, “I’m going to be hearing this for the rest of my life, aren’t I?”

Wrapping Up

After 9, we met up again and did a final circuit of the floor, checking for anything either of us wanted to show the other, or anything one of us might want to pick up. We ended up at the SLG booth examining The Map of Humanity for something like 20 minutes, trying to spot all the real-life and fanciful place names and where they were located. (Hollywood showed up in about 5 places.) We bought a copy.

Then it was back to the hotel to drop off all our stuff and get ready to meet up with my brother and his fiancee for dinner. They took us to a fantastic Indian restaurant called Mehfil that was somewhat off the beaten path as far as the convention was concerned. Afterward we tried to go to a nearby pub, but it was really crowded (it was Saturday night, after all), so we started looking for another place to go. We ended up walking through the area where Wikimedia has its offices. Eventually we ended up back at a frozen yogurt place in Metreon, a shopping mall across the street from the Moscone convention center, and we hung out there until closing.

Coming up next: Sunday in San Francisco.

Note: If you want to skip straight to the photos, head over to my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set on Flickr.

We’d been to WonderCon once in 2008 and had a great time, and while we weren’t planning to make it an annual trip, the timing worked out such that we’d be in San Francisco the right weekend anyway.

Staying in San Francisco: The Mosser

Last year we stayed at the Mark Twain, which was okay, but this year on my brother’s recommendation we stayed at the Mosser Hotel. It was quite nice, although the rooms were still extremely small by modern standards — small enough that instead of an actual desk, there’s a fold-out desk on the armchair. There’s also a flatscreen TV with both pay-per-view and video game rentals, and an AT&T wireless hotspot accessible from the room. The staff was nice, and the location was perfect. We were in a decent area of town, near restaurants, 5 minutes from the Moscone Convention Center one way, 5 minutes from a BART, MUNI & cable car station the other way, and right across the street from the official convention hotel.

Day 4: Friday (Feb 27) at WonderCon

After Thursday’s long drive, we slept in Friday morning and made our way to the convention center around 11:00. The “line” to get to the registration area moved quickly enough that it might as well not have been a line, and there were only a few people in front of us at the badge pick-up windows, so we made it through the whole process in only a few minutes. Then we stood in line for 45 minutes waiting for the hall to open at noon. Oh, well!

We started by making a beeline to the BOOM! Studios booth to pick up several copies of the Farscape #1 WonderCon exclusive variant — one for us, and several more for people at the Terra Firma message board. Series writer Keith R.A. DeCandido was there signing them, and we chatted a bit with him and with another Farscape fan. After that I got in line for the DC booth, and Katie went off to explore. I picked up a bunch of random swag from DC, some of which I want to keep and some of which I’ll probably offer to people on Speed Force.

Next I headed over to Artist’s Alley to track down some of the artists connected with Comic Book Tattoo for signatures. I’d gotten a few of them (including Tori Amos herself!) at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, but took the massively heavy lead weight book back to my hotel room at the first opportunity, not thinking that I could catch up with more of the creators. So now I’m trying to fix that.

I found David Mack first, and he had a whole spread of Kabuki material. As we talked, I admitted that I’d never read any of it, and he not only offered me a few issues of the latest series for free, he signed them!

I wandered the floor a lot, picked up some cheap trades, scarfed down a small pizza and eventually went up to a panel on “The Real Archeology Behind Indiana Jones.” It was run by an archeology professor from some college out near Lake Tahoe, and he had this talk about the major artifacts in the four films — what is known about the Ark of the Covenant, where people are looking for it, (or in some cases, claim they’ve found it but won’t let anyone see) — the actual stories behind the Sankara stones and the Thugee cult — legends around the history of the Holy Grail, and where people think it might be — the history and legends of the various crystal skulls, none of which can be verifiably traced to an actual excavation.

Then I hit DC Nation, Katie hit panels on 2D visual effects and the shift from a cowboy metaphor to a super-hero metaphor in US Politics (all those Obama-as-Superman images), we met up at the BOOM! panel, and finally went to the Wonder Woman screening.

Friday was, overall, really laid-back. The crowds were light, people in line were patient, and there weren’t even too many people in costumes. Even DC Nation was relaxed, though that’s probably in large part because Dan Didio was at Megacon and Ian Sattler was running the panel.

Wonder Woman

We had no trouble getting into the Wonder Woman screening, and managed to get seats maybe 10 rows back. I noticed a woman I recognized in a WW outfit (someone I’d seen as WW at other cons). Oddly, they kept calling it the movie’s premiere, even though it had premiered at New York Comic-Con a few weeks earlier, so at best this was the west coast premiere. Still, the movie was very good and amazingly epic for a 90-minute animated film. (Reviews are all over the place now that the DVD is out, so I’ll skip the details.)

After the screening there was a discussion panel with producer Bruce Timm, screenwriter Michael Jelenic, actress Virginia Madsen (Hippolyta), director Lauren Montgomery, and executive producer Gregory Noveck. They talked about making the film for quite a while, then took audience questions until their time was almost up.

Then they ran the trailer for the next DC animated project: Green Lantern: First Flight. I’m not a huge Green Lantern fan, but this looks suitably cosmic in scope and sci-fi in tone, and frankly, that’s they way I prefer the character, so it looks promising!

Evening

After the discussion, we cleared out. Neither of us wanted to watch a bunch of Star Wars fan films at this point (I would have 10 years ago, but these days? Not a priority.), and we were hungry. So we headed back to the hotel to change and went out to look for someplace to eat dinner. We ended up at a very good steak restaurant in the Marriott, then went back to the hotel where stayed up way too late uploading photos and dashed off a first impressions post of the con.

Update: On the way out, though, we stopped at the mezzanine walkway, which has a long glass-enclosed view into the main floor. It was eerie to see all the booths set up, fully lit, but with covers thrown over tables, and the aisles empty except for (as far as I could see) one person.

Continued in Saturday at WonderCon.

Day 3: Thursday — Monterey and Carmel

We checked out of our hotel Thursday morning and drove down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Then we drove past it, past Cannery Row (which is now a shopping area), up one street, down another, and finally past a bunch of streets with NO LEFT TURN signs trying to find a way into a parking garage. Eventually we ended up on a highway that took us into the main part of town until we could finally turn around and make our way back to the Cannery Row area. *whew*

So we made it to the aquarium shortly after 10:00, which meant we got to see them feeding the penguins. It was about 15 minutes of introducing the black foot penguins, handing them fish, and asking kids in the audience to be “penguin heroes” by doing things like saving water.

I’d been to the aquarium twice before — once when I was around 10 with my parents, and once when I was around 20 with friends on a road trip, so it seems I’m on a roughly 10-year schedule. I’m 90% certain that half of the current building wasn’t there the first time I went. And I’m not so sure how much was there last time.

I missed the next two shows, feeding the sea fish and feeding the animals in the kelp forest, due to a tech call from work (the only one all week, thankfully), but Katie caught them both. I got to see a lot of an outdoor terrace on the third floor, which at least had a nice view of the bay, though it was cloudy all morning. Afterward she took me over to the outer-bay tank and showed me the way the anchovies (or was it sardines? neither of us can remember) school together and form this silvery shimmering cloud.

We took in about 3/4 of the aquarium during the rest of the morning and early afternoon, then went looking for lunch in Cannery Row. We ended up at a crepe place near where we parked, which wasn’t terribly good (they used pre-made crepes and some of the fillings that should have been hot were still cold when they were served), then went over to the Ghirardelli shop. Because ever since they closed the shop in South Coast Plaza, I can’t go to a city with a Ghirardelli shop and not go there. (Seriously, that was the way I could handle the stress of shopping in South Coast Plaza.) I had the Mint Bliss sundae. Katie just had the square of chocolate that they put on the sundae. And it was seriously good. Also, check out the picture of one of the tables they had outside.

So after stopping for chocolate & ice cream, we made our way out to Carmel By-The-Sea to check out Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo. Anyone who grew up in California in the last few decades will remember learning about the Spanish colonial period, and the emphasis on the chain of missions founded by Junipero Serra. Both of us had visited a number of the missions on family vacations, but somehow Katie’s family had missed this one, or at the very least she didn’t remember it. So we spent an hour or two exploring the grounds and the museum.

Something I hadn’t remembered was that this mission had collapsed during an earthquake in the 1800s, and was left in ruins until an early 20th century project to rebuild it from surviving structures, drawings and descriptions. Also interesting: it’s an active church, with a school on the grounds (which seemed to let out while we were there). Talk about living history!

Finally we went out to visit my aunt on her ranch up in Carmel Valley. We’d never been there, so it was kind of a surprise to see just how off the beaten path it was. It’s the kind of place where directions involve going to a certain mile marker, then looking for a one-lane road and following it up into the hills.

We only stayed for an hour or so, because we had to be in San Francisco that night, but we got to see the place (which has a fantastic view!) and catch up a bit before getting back on the road.

The next time I plan a trip I’m going to have to remember that driving estimates from Google Maps are not sufficient. Aside from traffic, you need to factor in late starts, stops for sightseeing or bathroom breaks, stopping for lunch, etc. We’d hoped to make it to San Francisco for dinner, but ended up taking the first exit in Gilroy, looking for someplace to eat. Amazingly the street proved to have only a small pizza place and the occasional bar, so we finally turned onto a side street and found ourselves… back at the freeway. Once we pulled out a map, it became clear that the road we’d taken actually paralleled Highway 101 except for the one spot where it turned a little diagonal and crossed. We ended up just eating at Chevy’s, rationalizing that the locations near us had long since closed, so it was still a restaurant we couldn’t go to at home!

It was around 10:30 at night by the time we checked into the Mosser Hotel in San Francisco. We’d picked the hotel based on my brother’s recommendation, and were quite happy with our three-day stay there.

Coming up next: San Francisco and WonderCon. Meanwhile, I’ve got more photos on Flickr in my California Coast photo set. Update: Continued in Friday at WonderCon.

Day 1: Tuesday — LA to SLO

We left Tuesday morning (February 24) after eating breakfast at the Gypsy Den in Costa Mesa, took a relaxed drive up the 5 and Highway 101 to San Luis Obispo, stopping in Santa Barbara for lunch. From SLO we cut across to the coast and up to San Simeon on Pacific Coast Highway. After we checked into our hotel (the Best Western Cavalier again, since it really impressed us last time), we headed into Cambria for dinner at a restaurant called Robin’s.

One of the things we tried to do on this trip was to always eat at local restaurants rather than familiar chains, just to try something new. Overall, that worked out really well. The only real misstep was a crepe place in Monterey.

Funny astronomical timing: Last year we were in San Simeon the night of a lunar eclipse. This year it was ideal viewing time for Comet Lulin. After trying to spot it from the hotel grounds, I finally drove out of town a few miles for stargazing. It was a fantastic view, but the comet was too faint for me to see.

Day 2: Wednesday – Seals and Hearst Castle

Anyway, we spent most of Wednesday near San Simeon. First we drove up the highway a bit to a viewpoint near the Piedras Blancas lighthouse to look at the elephant seals that crowded the beach. Most of them were just lying around relaxing, but every once in a while one would move, and I saw a couple of seals fighting, and a couple of seals, um, doing something else.

Hearst Castle took up the bulk of the day, as we took two tours, one before lunch and one after. In the morning (after the seals) we toured the Casa del Monte and the North Wing (one of the latest additions to the house), showing interesting contrast in design and decoration style. Then we came back down to the visitor’s center, had lunch in the cafe (which was surprisingly good — probably because they used Hearst Ranch beef for the barbequed beef sandwiches and the chili), and went back up the hill to the next tour, which covered the upper floors of the main house.

We stopped in Cambria on the way out, where Katie hit the local yarn store and I explored the nearby shops. There was one that had a huge collection of gemstones and fossils, including a lot of humongous geodes. Then we headed inland along highway 46 to pick up the 101, because I really didn’t want to drive the stretch of PCH between San Simeon and Carmel! (Winding road with 100-foot sheer drops into the ocean, during late afternoon and running past sunset? I don’t think so!) Along the way I kept looking for the turnout where you can see all the way to Morro Bay, and I found it. I managed to get a shot with sunlight this time:

We originally planned to meet up with my aunt in the Carmel Valley area, but the timing didn’t work out, and by the time we made it to Pacific Grove I was ready to just collapse into bed. Fortunately the motel was a pleasant surprise (we experimented with using Hotwire for nights when we weren’t looking for a specific hotel): we got the Anton Inn, which was a tiny little motel surrounded by other motels way off the beaten path, but the staff was friendly, the rooms were very nice and comfortable, and the rooms were stocked with a variety of books! The only real downside is that the area has very flaky cell reception.

We walked about half a block to an Asian fusion restaurant, where I had some sort of citrus duck dish. There was only one other party in the restaurant the entire time we were there, but the food was very good, making me think they probably depend heavily on the tourist season (which is not late February). Then we walked back to the hotel, read a bit to unwind, and hit the sack.

Speaking of which, I should do that now. I really didn’t think it would take this long to write things up! (Plus my internal clock keeps telling me it’s only eleven.) Photos are up on Flickr in my California Coast photo set, with a separate WonderCon photo set. I’ll write up more of the trip later this week. Continued in Monterey and Carmel.

1. Take the following Monday off. Comic-Con is not relaxing. Even if you don’t go out to parties every night, it’s still exhausting. It wasn’t so bad when we left early on Sunday, but the last two years we’ve stayed all the way to the end of the show. Two-plus hours of driving, plus a stop for dinner, meant we weren’t home until Sunday evening. You’re supposed to be a zombie at the con, not after you get home. It would be much better to take a day to sleep in and recover a bit. (Plus it would allow extra time to do things like sort through photos and post them quickly.)

2. Take the whole week off and make it a vacation. We missed maybe a grand total of 4 hours of daytime programming this year, and still didn’t catch everything we wanted to. (Admittedly, a lot of that involved choosing between simultaneous events.) That doesn’t leave much time to just be in San Diego, except for nighttime. It would be nice to head down the previous weekend and spend a few days as tourists. Maybe hit the Wild Animal Park or something. Then switch hotels on Wednesday and do the con. Certainly our trip to WonderCon earlier this year benefited from taking extra time to do other things.

It started after last year’s Comic-Con, when I decided I wanted to go to something a bit less…intense. Last year’s Wizard World LA was nice, but a bit sparse, so I went looking for more comic and general sci-fi/fantasy cons within driving distance of the LA/OC area. Surprisingly, I didn’t find much. Gaming conventions, costuming conventions, Anime Expo, sure, but sci-fi? Pretty much just Loscon, which we both gave up on after 2002 (and from what I’ve heard, hasn’t picked up again). I asked around a bit on some forums, and someone on either Comic Bloc or Newsarama suggested WonderCon, and suggested considering the city as a vacation destination, not just a place to find a hotel for the con.

Since WonderCon worked out so well, I’m looking at what else might be fun. That’s part of why I did my price comparison last month, and Kevin Standlee’s comments got me looking at WorldCons and the like again. Not for this year, but maybe a few years out.

Looking at all these cons, I realized that beyond a certain threshold, distance doesn’t matter. Only the destination. If it’s far enough away that you have to fly, the only thing that distance impacts is the cost of your plane ticket. Whether your flight is 5 hours or 10 hours*, it’s still going to take up most of a day or night when you factor in dealing with the airports. Everything else, from hotel prices to whether you need a passport, a phrasebook, or currency exchange, is a factor of the destination.

WonderCon, I think, was at the boundary of driving distance from here. We could make the trip out in one day, but it was a lot more fun to break it into stages and make it a road trip. San Diego is at the boundary of commuting distance. We could drive out there in the morning and drive back at night (and I did that with my parents for over a decade), but it’s not practical to do for more than one day. Whereas if I wanted to, I could easily commute to Wizard World Los Angeles 2 or even 3 days. (As it was, we only went for Saturday.)

With two cons in Q1, and San Diego coming up in July, any traveling we do later this year is probably not going to be convention-related. As it is, we’ve talked seriously about three possible non-con vacation spots. But it might be worth casting a wider net for cons in 2009 or 2010.

*Katie and I were talking about this, and realized that it’s probably different if you have kids. In that case, a 5-hour flight probably would be significantly harder to manage than a 3-hour flight.

Friday morning, we checked out of the motel as quickly as we could, then met up with our friends before they left for work. After reminding ourselves of why we don’t usually eat at Denny’s, we drove up the east side of the San Francisco Bay toward Napa Valley.

I don’t really like wine much, and Katie can’t drink it, so we weren’t looking for tastings, but Katie had found a sake garden on one of the maps. The weather kept changing from partly cloudy to light rain and back again. The play of light and shadow on the hills made for beautiful scenery. It was somewhat similar to our drive along the 46, which seemed to be half ranches (the west half) and half wineries (the east half).

Unfortunately, the sake garden in question was gone. The building was deserted, and a chain stretched across the driveway. I stopped the car in front of it, and Katie dashed through the drizzle to look at the limp paper sign taped to the post in the middle of the driveway. It was a public notice for a liquor license, in a new name.

We tried to look for another place that did sake tastings, but had no success. We decided to drive into Napa for lunch. Downtown Napa is an odd mix of old and modern. One block looks like Old Town Orange, or Tustin, or Fullerton. Half a block away, there’s a shopping center that looks like it could be a section of the Irvine Spectrum. It was more or less dead, which I thought was strange even for early afternoon on a Friday, but we found a place called Christopher’s that made wraps and sandwiches, and sold interesting food.

After lunch we made our way west through Napa Valley and Sonoma Valley until we reached the 101. From there we went south (a drive which reminded me quite a bit of the I-5 between Oceanside and San Diego), crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, and checked into our hotel. It was approaching sunset.

Once we were settled, I called my brother for directions to his place. It turned out he was just getting off work, so we met up at the train station and took the MUNI out to his neighborhood. We met his fiancee, hung out at their apartment for a while, then went out for sushi.

Back at the hotel, Katie did some make-up tests for her Sylar victim costume (which she ended up not using), we got our backpacks in order for the convention, and went to bed.

Saturday is pretty much all covered by the WonderCon convention report.

Sunday morning we went down to the coffee shop next to the hotel, then checked out and started on the long drive home around 11:30. It ended up taking 12 hours for several reasons:

• We took the 101 instead of the 5, which follows the coast and is considerably longer. On the plus side, it twists and turns enough to prevent highway hypnosis at night.
• It was windy and raining. The storm we’d been expecting all weekend finally hit.
• We took a detour to Casa de Fruta, which probably added ~45 minutes of travel time.
• And of course stops for lunch, dinner, coffee, etc.

The worst of the rain hit in two places: First, on that detour to Casa de Fruta. I filled up the car there, and got thoroughly drenched even though the gas station was covered. We stopped for lunch, I dried out somewhat, and the rain moved on. The second was near San Luis Obispo, where it rained hard enough at I could barely see the taillights of the car in front. It didn’t help that it was approaching dusk.

We stopped for dinner in Santa Barbara, and finally made it home around 11:30.

The Prius handled its first real road trip admirably. We drove 1193 miles in total. The best mileage was on the last leg of the trip home, the final ~130 miles from Santa Barbara, where we averaged 48 MPG. The worst was from San Luis Obispo to Sunnyvale, with the side trip out to San Simeon—full of twisty mountain roads, steep grades, and, when it turned into a full-on freeway, I was pushing the speed to get us to San Jose in time for the last Winchester tour. The car handled everything thrown at it, except two things: a Target shopping cart in Paso Robles, which careened into it and scratched the paint, and a piece of gravel that dinged the windshield. I was seriously annoyed.

Best Western Cavalier Oceanfront Resort in San Simeon: Excellent. Calling it a resort is pushing it—it’s really just a motel—but we had absolutely no complaints. The service was friendly, the bed was comfortable, everything was clean and worked (including the free wifi). It’s right on the coast, with a wide lawn atop a bluff where you can sit and watch the waves come in. At night they light up firepits, and you can sit, keep warm, and listen to the ocean. Even the standard room had a well-stocked mini-bar. We’ve been talking about going back to Hearst Castle to catch the tours we missed, and we’ll probably stay here again.

Best Western Silicon Valley Inn in Sunnyvale: Lousy. I forget which one of us came up with the phrase, “The Worst Best Western in the West.” The sink leaked, the hotel was on default air conditioning (even though it was ~50°F and raining outside), the heater was a loud, grinding thing that sounded like a truck engine, the bedspread had cigarette burns in it, the towels felt like sandpaper, and the wifi wouldn’t accept the password the front desk gave us (which is probably just as well, since there were 4 access points broadcasting the same SSID, so for all I know one of them could’ve been a rogue). And the staff was taciturn at best. All this for the same price as the Cavalier.

Hotel Mark Twain in San Francisco: Good. It’s located in downtown San Francisco, just a few blocks from Moscone Center (about a 10–15 minute walk), and it’s a classic hotel. On my brother’s recommendation, we paid extra for the “deluxe” rooms. Everything was comfortable, if small, and again the staff was friendly. Never got a chance to try out the Internet access. The one thing I was really disappointed with was the room service. It’s hard to eat a mostly-done pork chop with a plastic knife and fork out of a 4-inch-high cardboard box. There was also a loud party in the room next to us Saturday night, but we were up late anyway. On the plus side, there’s a coffee shop two doors away that was always packed, though we never had to wait for a table. The rate of people arriving and finishing was perfectly balanced. One caveat: The hotel is located at the edge of the financial district, so you want to leave going uphill on Taylor or east on O’Farrell. If you go downhill on Taylor, you end up walking through the Tenderloin.