GenCon Day 1A: I'm going in, cover me!

Finally, Greg is sending in his blog entries for his trip to GenCon. Our valiant attempt at semi-live blogging a valiant but ill-conceived (apparently) failure, you'll have to settle for a few weeks late instead...

Armed with the travel intel I garnered at Comic-Con, I geared up for GenCon. I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes. Apparently I decided to make all new ones.

I started with NCsoft on July 9th. So, I was a month-long NC veteran by the time GenCon rolled in. I had already been out of the office a chunk with ComicCon, so I had laid plans to fly out early morning instead of the night before, so I could spend another whole day in the office. In a word: “Oops!”

Albert from the Tabula Rasa team had been doing the same thing—trying to spend as much time in-office as possible. He was still going on the packaging stuff etc for TR, and we figured we would fly out there together. Of course, I wasn’t really thinking about that 6:30 AM flight = waking up at 3:30 AM to get to the airport on time. Note to self, refresher course in math might do me some good.

I woke up at a time roosters reserve for their fishing trips and I made my way to the airport. Half-conscious, we arrive in Indianapolis without incident. Wow! No airport delays or anything! SWEET. Other than waking up early, this trip was going great already. The plan was to head over to the hotel, drop off our stuff, and be off and running.

We got to the hotel, which of course was too early for the room to be ready. No biggie, they’ll check our bags in, and we can head off to the convention.

Then they lowered the boom on my unsuspecting noggin’. Not only did they overbook the hotel (duh!) but there wouldn’t be two beds in the room like they had promised over the phone when we reserved the whole block for our team. Okay. So get me the roll-away couch they said to expect. Nope. Not gonna happen.

What?

No bed. No hide-a-bed. No roller bed. Looks like I’m spoonin’ with Albert unless the hotel can rustle up something quick. We check our bags, let the hotel work on the problem, and walk a few blocks to the con.