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.

The weird thing about the phone reservation system is that I don’t actually know which hotel we’ve gotten yet. They took my name, contact info and top 3+ choices (I gave them 5), then handed the info to their processing center. They’ll call back (later, I assume, after the rush is over) to let me know which hotel I got. I do have a backup that I reserved directly, but the convention discount is significant, especially when you add up four days.

It was interesting watching commentary streaming by on Twitter (search for “comiccon,” “comic-con” or “comicon”) as people started out commenting, then complaining, and eventually celebrating (after about an hour) when they finally got through. Or really letting loose when the system dropped them.

Update: Got an email confirming our reservation. It’s farther out than the backup, but it’s ~$100 cheaper (over the course of 4 days – possibly more, depending on how much the other hotel charges for internet access) and there’s a shuttle. Now to weigh ~$100 vs. walking distance and figure out which room to keep and which to free up for someone else who needs one.

Cross-posted at Speed Force

This time last year, they’d already gone on sale and sold out.

As recently as three (or maybe four) years ago, they’d have sent a postcard by January. They used to include a full list of hotels in the winter newsletter with distance and prices. I could swear I remember them going on sale in January.

Of course, five years ago you could still book the Little Italy Super 8 only a month in advance. Now the discounted rooms are in such demand that they sell out in a matter of hours.

Like last year, they are only selling tickets in advance, so if you plan on attending, you should order them online.

We had lunch at El Fandango in Old Town, then wandered around the shops for a bit. By now we’ve seen most of the exhibits and museums. But the San Diego House of Coffee and Tea is a must-visit stop, if for no other reason than to pick up some Highlander Grog. We also grabbed some hot coffee to walk around with, since it was gloomy with occasional drizzling. (I later noticed a sign in the Gaslamp area that said “Umbrellas $9.95. When Raining, $19.95.)

They had set up period tents and wagons around the grounds, mostly in the courtyard with the flagpole made from the ship’s mast. One of the shops we visited was the mineral & gemstone store, which I’ve always liked visiting even back when I was a kid. And right up front, they had the hugest trilobite fossil I’d ever seen, around a foot long.

After a few hours, we drove into downtown San Diego and checked into the Omni Hotel. I’d never stayed there before, but it’s highly sought-after among attendees at Comic-Con because it’s right across the street from the convention center. Our room had a view of the end of the convention center, which will shed a little light on the size of the crowds.

The building at the lower right, with the sideways cylinder structure, is one end of the San Diego Convention Center, near Hall H. See that courtyard/sculpture garden between it and the Hilton? Imagine it full of people, in a long line snaking back and forth, waiting to get into a mega-major-media event like Heroes or Twilight.

A few notes about the Omni: The rooms and view are very nice. The staff is very helpful. The person arranging everything had set us up with late checkout, and I couldn’t remember what time it had been set for, but when I called, they just asked me what time I needed. Amenities are quite nice: there’s a DVD player, a well-stocked minibar fridge, a safe in the room, even a spare ethernet cable in case you forgot yours.

But there are some things that just don’t make sense. For instance: The bathrooms have no towel racks, so you have to set your hand towel in a clump on one of the shelves, where it won’t get dry. And the bathrooms have wooden blinds which can be opened to let in light — but they don’t close tightly enough to muffle sound.

Anyway, Sunday morning we slept in. The sun had come out, though it was partly cloudy all morning. I started out on a quick trip to Ralphs (10 minutes each way) with a sweater and jacket, had removed the jacket by the time I got back, and tossed the sweater when I got back to our room. When we went out to eat later, I just took the jacket, and as the sun passed behind clouds and wind kicked up and died down I kept wanting to put the jacket on, take it off, put on the sweater I’d left at the hotel, stick with the T-shirt, and so on.

I couldn’t help but compare the Gaslamp District today with the way I’ve seen it during conventions. It was a lot less crowded! We stopped at a Farmer’s market on Third St., where we picked up some fresh bread, raspberries, and a companion for a hair stick that Katie had found at a glass-maker’s shop near Old Town.

We caught a late brunch at Cafe 222, which we’d discovered this past summer. (Side note: your Flash-only website, however stylish, is completely useless when viewed on a mobile phone — even a modern one like an iPhone or G1. Have you considered putting at least your hours in plain old ordinary HTML?) I ate way too much, but it was basically two meals.

After brunch we stopped at It’s a Grind to pick up some coffee for the road and went back to our room, narrowly missing a parade if the signs on Fifth St. were to be believed. I took a couple of photos out the window now that the scene was better lit, then we grabbed our stuff, checked out, and headed back north.

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.

Update Wednesday Morning: Well, I made it through. Oddly enough, in exactly the same amount of time as last year. I had the confirmation number at 10:04. Weird.

Once again, I was completely unable to get through by phone. The website was hit and miss, and actually crashed at one point, serving up only a “500 Server Busy” error. Right after I entered my name and address for a reservation. Nice. The current blog entry is filling up with complaints from people having similar or worse experiences.

Update 2: The Beat has a growing comment thread as well, and notes that the con hotel blog is making noises about trying to get Travel Planners to fix the problems. I think having an official place where they can read exactly what people are going through is helping convey the fact that the reservation system is broken, and that it’s not just the imbalanced supply and demand for rooms. (end of update 2)

I’m going to repeat some of my criticisms about the actual website, which seems designed expressly to make it bog down under this load:

First, it’s got way too many images. Every image takes extra bandwidth that they don’t have, and it requires another round-trip for the browser to request it. And that really slows things down. People trying to get a room for Comic-Con don’t care whether a header is in a nifty font, or the borders are rounded, or the button looks nifty. They want it to work. Replace all those text images with actual text, and do any borders or backgrounds or colors using CSS. If it only takes 3 hits to load the page instead of 20, that means they can serve 6 times as many pages with the same number of connections.

Second, they use JavaScript where it’s not needed. Seriously, the “Book this hotel” link should be a normal link so that as soon as the sloooow page brings up a hotel I want that has rooms available, I can click on it, stop loading the list of hotels, and be on my way. I shouldn’t be stuck waiting for the whole page to load before I can click on one link.

Finally, and this was something that I couldn’t see at the time I posted my comments over there, the actual reservation process uses too many pages. Submit personal info. Click on continue (which is a JavaScript link, naturally—WTF?). Then it brings up a page with a button to enter your credit card info, which is another JS link that pops up a new form. What the hell? Every page load is a possible point of failure. That form should have been on the page immediately following the personal info page. And after that was the “Wait, you’re not done yet!” confirmation page. “Well, I should be! What if this page doesn’t load completely!” And then the “processing…” page, which refreshes to the “Okay, now you’re done” page. I kept expecting the connection to time out again, or to see that “Server Busy” error.

Anyway, enough ranting for now. I got the reservation, and that’s the important part. Time to get some rest and see if I’m feeling well enough to go into work later (I’ve been fighting a cold the last few days).

They were still working on the lobby when we checked in, so they had moved the reception desks onto little plywood stands over on one side. One of the clerks accidentally knocked the power cord out while we were checking in. By Saturday morning they were done. The painters and plastic tarps were gone, the desks and furniture were in their places, the fountain was running.

Meanwhile, we kept coming back to our room to find that yet another item had had its Radisson logo removed or replaced with a Doubletree logo. And then there was this bulletin:

Hotel Plusses:

• Near trolley stop (Little Italy/County Center)
• Shuttle stop
• Near coffee (It’s a Grind)
• Near restaurants
• Nice rooms
• Free wireless internet (though the wired port didn’t work)
• Just remodeled, so everything’s new

Hotel Minuses:

• Shuttle has to go through traffic
• Trolley requires transfer unless you get the red line (special event service)
• Won’t be an issue next year, but we were there during the transition

Factor in waiting for a shuttle or trolley, and you can figure on 40 minutes to get to or from the convention center.

I’d stay there again, though I think next year I’ll try to get something a bit closer. Of course, I tried that this year, and by the time I got through, everything closer was either full or way too expensive.

Reservations went on sale at 9:00 AM. I hit the website, started calling, and started faxing.

Phone: I couldn’t get through for the entire ~50 minutes of redialing. Just “no answer” over and over again.

Fax: Busy signal, over and over again. Occasionally the circuit would connect, and it would start making fax tones, but it never actually completed the handshake.

Web: The convention website loaded, very slowly, just enough to get me the link to the Travel Planners site. I could get that first page to load—again, very slowly—and occasionally I could get into the second page, where I selected the check-in and check-out dates and preferred hotel. From that point on, it was timeouts, and a bogus error page about how either I had been inactive for 12 minutes or my browser was not accepting cookies (neither of which was true), and I should hit refresh to start over.

Around 9:50 I finally managed to get to the hotel availability page.* My first choice wasn’t available, so I went back and selected All Hotels (which I should have done in the first place). My second choice wasn’t available either. In fact, there were only about three hotels in the downtown area that had rooms left for the full length of the convention.** So I selected my third choice. In the 10 seconds between displaying that page and me clicking on it, the room had been reserved. So I went back, picked a fourth choice, filled in my reservation info, filled in my credit card info… and it stalled on the last page of the reservation, showing only the title. Eventually, in desperation, I hit refresh, and it sent me back to the beginning!

So I went through the whole process again. Fortunately, traffic has eased somewhat, and it was only dial-up slow instead of Slashdotted-slow. My fourth choice was no longer available (or else it hadn’t yet released the room I had almost booked), but my third choice was back in the running, and I was able to get it. It turns out that at the point it had stalled the first time through, all I had left was to mark two checkboxes agreeing to the room rate and the transaction, and press a submit button. I finally had a reservation number at 10:04 AM.

Incidentally, it’s very much worth booking through the convention if you can. I spot-checked some prices, and for a double room, the convention price was typically 40–50% less than the price listed on the hotel’s own website, and 30% less than prices through AAA or Travelocity.

Worth re-reading: Suggestions for Comic-Con (here) and Comic-Con By the Numbers (Comics Reporter)

*By this time I was using IE7, because I kept getting the bogus cookie errors on Firefox. I wasn’t sure if it was a server problem or a browser problem, though Firefox is able to get through at least the hotel availability step now, so it was probably coincidence. And I only managed to get past the first step on IE7 because I had the Web Developer add-on, which let me outline where the submit buttons were… because the server was too busy to send the images!

**Last year, they completely sold out within a few hours, and the travel agents practically begged people to let go of extra rooms they had booked “just in case.”

The crunch is amazing. Last year, San Diego’s public transportation system dissolved under the combined assault of 100,000+ Comic Con attendees and a weekend of Padres games. Two years ago, the first year we stayed in town instead of just driving down for Saturday, we booked so late that we were stuck with the Super 8. Just for kicks, I checked the prices there. A room for this coming weekend would cost half what we paid per night on Comic Con weekend in 2004. And their prices during the con this year? I can’t tell, because they’re already sold out.

This morning, Travel Planners (the company handling reservations for the convention) sent out an email to people who had reserved hotel rooms through their service. After assuring me that my reservation was fine, they went on to ask:

In the meantime, we have a favor to ask of you. Please take a minute to reassess the number of rooms that you’ve booked and help your fellow attendees and exhibitors by canceling any rooms that you are not absolutely certain you’ll need.

Like you, we’re all thrilled that Comic Con is growing by leaps and bounds every year, but with each new show it gets more and more difficult to find enough hotel rooms to accommodate so many visitors. Accordingly, every hotel room becomes an integral part of the show’s success.

It’s not uncommon for people to grab multiple rooms just in case more people come, or to keep their options open (say, reserving both an expensive hotel downtown and a less expensive one further out, then cancelling one once they’ve made a decision). I’m astonished that it’s come to the agency pleading with people to let others have a chance at the rooms now, instead of waiting until just before the hotels start charging for cancellations.

On a related note, now’s as good a time to any to link to some recommendations for anyone planning to attend Comic Con:

• Our own Suggestions for Comic-Con still hold up. I’d like to add: don’t forget to pack long pants as well as shorts. It may be July, but San Diego is a coastal city, and it can get cold at night or in the morning.
• The Comics Reporter’s Comic Con By the Numbers has been updated.
• And of course, there’s Aubrey’s Guide to Con Hygiene.

First, a modern Stonehenge from the UC San Diego campus, all made with stone (or cement) cubes. Update: Found some info on USCD’s Stonehenge.

Then there was this cactus in Old Town, which looked like it was made up of feet!

Something about the phrase “Vegetable Garage” just sounds funny. (This is at Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego.) There’s also a Fruit Garage.

Sam Adams Smoothies? Where’s Lister from Red Dwarf? Someone needs to tell him he can get those beer milkshakes here!

We weren’t entirely sure just what was supposed to be haunting this hotel, but it’s next to Hooters. Make of that what you will…

And finally, here’s a movie-style marquee from the Ghirardelli shop.

(On a side note, I really miss having a Ghirardelli shop in South Coast Plaza. After shopping overload, I could just stop in there, get a milkshake, and be able to face another store or two. Plus I actually had a reason to go to South Coast Plaza on occasion.)

(Continued in Part 2.)