BotCon 2011 Experience
Day 1 - Thursday 2nd of June 2011
Having set my phone to go off at 05:00 the previous night, I found myself awake at 01:30, 02:30, 03:30 and 04:30. I finally got up at 05:15,
jump in the shower and got ready for the trip to the airport. Terminal 5 was 15 minutes drive away, but I had to go into work prior to heading
to the airport to pick up the BotCon invoices, in order for us to pick up our exclusive toys, as Steve had forgotten to print it out. By 6:30
Clare (my girlfriend) was ready take me to work, so a quick text to Steve and I was on my way. The building at work was locked at the front door,
but luckily a colleague had already arrived (it was coming up to 07:00 now). I picked the printouts up, that I had printed the previous night
from home, and headed to Terminal 5 to wait for Steve. After a quick goodbye Steve turned up about 5 minutes after I had arrived.
Outgoing flight
We made our way to the baggage drop (10kilos for, Steve, 15.5 for me due to the equipment I had for work in my bag) .. we pondered what the weight
would be for the return leg before heading through Customs. After that it was a nice Full English Breakfast, as neither Steve or I are that keen
on aircraft food, a quick look around the shops before we decided to sit down and check the Internet for news on the work's Samsung Tablet.
We soon discovered a BotCon news story Steve had worked on at 6:30 hadn't be put live, good thing I had the wireless dongle so a quick change
of Sim Card and I was online on my laptop approving the story. By that time the gate was announced so we made our way to the international terminal.
Within five minutes of arriving there boarding started, seats 49A and 49B .. that was us ... so we boarded pretty quick. Just before takeoff
the guy next to me decided to change seats to the middle row, giving us a spare seat next to us, which was nice. Now it was the 10 and 1/2 hour
flight left to go (down from 11 hours).
We flew out east, then looped around north, heading towards Cambridge before turning west towards Manchester, up through Iceland, Greenland and into Canada.
We decided to take some picture during take-off, on my phone, then some in the air over Greenland and NewFoundLand. It was after this point I
decided to create a diary, or log, of the trip.
The chose of movies wasn't great, and for some reason didn't actually match up with those listed in the InFlight Magazine. Steve watched an
Ashton Kutcher flick and I decided to catch up and watch Mastermind ... that was pretty good. We skipped in flight lunch, eating the Mikado I had
picked up for the flight - the breakfast had covered us for most of the flight.
There appeared to be a rather excessive number of Germans on the flight, and women .. which is odd, usually its American school or colleague goers
coming back from a trip to Europe.
Steve decided to spend some time working on a new version of The Visionaries.net
on his Samsung Net book (though not that powerful, it's light small design is good for trips. He'd actually installed Apache, MYSQL and PHP onto
the machine he actually code up the site during the flights. I decided to mock up some layouts for another project, Plastic Coke, before getting
on with the start of this article. Up to this point the flight had been pretty calm, with only a slight amount of turbulence, though as I write
that sentence the plane starts to rock sideways and up and down .... classic me. I was trying to avoid the temptation to start working on my day
job. My BotCon trip had been extended by my work so I could stay in Los Angeles allowing me to visit a customer in San Francisco. This meant that
my work ended up paying for my flights, which was a great result for me .... not so much for Clare, as it meant I'd miss her birthday ... actually
I was due to land on Gareth (The Great Destroyer's) birthday on the following Friday, at mid-day, and go straight into work that afternoon from
the airport (as the office is just around the corner, and Gareth was off).
Landed in Los Angeles, and travelling up to Pasadena
We had decided to pre-book a return trip using the Shuttle Bus service in LAX, rather than having to worry about getting a cab. The only problem
was that of all the information I had kept, I hadn't kept the time of the pickup for the return leg ... whoops.
Getting through customs took ages , first part took 15 minutes, getting bags probably 20, then there was an amazing queue, for over an hour, to get past the second part of customs. We managed to find att small queue out the way, which took 15 mins to get through.
From there was aa 45 minute drive, roughly, to Pasadena ... with the driver of the SuperShuttle wanting money, though I'd paid onlline. The Super Suttle website is meant to give you a reference number, which I didn't get, so that took 15 minutes to work out. Finally we were checked in.
The BotCon check-in
BotCon 2011 was our third BotCon in the US, well technically the first was OTFCC 2003 - as it had changed names days before, after Glen Hallet
had taken full control of the event. That time it was in Rosemont in Chicago, we had gone with Gareth and had thoroughly enjoyed the weekend.
Out second Botcon experience in the US, we had attended BotCon Europe 1999 and then OTFCC Europe, was in Rhode Island in 2007. BotCon had an early
charity screening of the first Transformers movie, where most people in attendance got to see the film for the first time before it came out in
cinemas. By that time we had already seen it twice (well I had, Steve only once as he couldn't make it to the FDA screening in London earlier
that week). BotCon 2011 was going to be the first BotCon that we had gone to that we hadn't attended with Gareth, which felt a little odd ... but
he was busy at work ... as I'm typing this!!
We were dreading the mess that would be the BotCon check-in ... 2003 was so easy. Arrive, get pass - no real queues. Then during the event, at
any time go and pick up the toys. We also had Gold Passes for that event, first 50 people to register, so we were allowed to "jump queues".
So, we arrived at the convention centre, locatuion for BotCon 2011 just under 2 hours before the doors opened, to queue for the registration queues.
By the time we had arrived there was already over 100 people queuing, and more coming all the time.
We were spotted by some Moonbase2'ers, or Full Metal Hero'ers, or whatever you want to call them as we made our way to queue up.
I was pimping out my Auto Assembly committe shirt, for some shameless advertisement.
It was around 18:20 by the time we could get in the hall, then another 30 minute queue for the Boxset and attendee package (Karl Hartman servered us, but couldn't find out order of toys first of all). From there we moved to the next collection point, non-box figures (limited to 1 per badge - with attendees allowed to pick up more the following day). Steve queued in the "convention exclusive line" to pickup or loose toys and litho. I queued in the cash "everything" line, so I could pick up another set plus the BotCon 2009 comic we are missing and the TFCC Cheetor for Dean (Big D's Toy Chest). It took over 40 minutes for Steve to get server, probably nearer an hour. I was queing for over 90 miniutes.
I finally got back to the hotel at 21:00, after some 5 hours of queing. We then went to have dinner with Jim Sorenson and Bill Forester, along with a few people they had gathered together, only to get a little lost. The next day we found the restrauant on a map I had printed out, and yeah we'd gone no-where near it.
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