GSRJedi said:
Saturday morning, I was up at 4:30 for the Lucas panel and was lucky enough to be under the protection of the Hyatt's driveway, but I was at the end of the line where it turned around so I was constantly being whipped by the wind. It was so cold (36 degrees or something) for someone from the desert.
I was there too! Stuck in the wind at the front edge of the driveway, near the street corner. Except I started much earlier. Actually, I spent the whole night outside in line, but that wasn't my original intention.
My hotel was near the airport and after the Master Replicas, 501st, and private parties, I was too drunk to drive to my room. So in my intoxicated state I decided that it would be better to just to line up rather than risk a DUI or accident and then sleep through the Lucas panel.
I lined up at about midnight about 100 people back in the non-fan club line on the east side. I had a fan-club badge, but that line was farther away and the non-fan club line was in a dry location.
Originally, we were under the north side convention center awning, but some GenCon rep decided we would be better off out in the cold and rain of the east entrance.
Then at about 4am, we saw a bunch of security people usher a couple thousand people to the Hyatt but they didn't do jack for us. Finally the security guard that was assigned to us got through to whoever was in chanrge and the response was "Oh, yeah, we forgot that we had seperated everyone into two lines. So just put the people that were waiting in line since yesterday evening in the back of the new line we just formed where new people are arriving with warm dry clothes and half a nights sleep."
To add insult to injury, I missed the first panel and had to wait even longer, but was close to the front of the line for the second panel. However, instead of seating people in line by filling the middle sections first, they sat everyone by rows first so I was assigned a seat in the front corner where you couldn't even see the giant TV screen let alone the stage. By then I was fed up, and my hangover bad attitude was starting to kick in so I stood up, rallied a couple of dozen other people who were in line since the day before and marched to the very middle of the middle section and plopped down in center seats about a dozen rows back. We left empty seats in front of us, and when we were told to move by the two poor volunteers that were assigned to our section, they got an earful by 20-30 people and gave up. So at least the seats weren't too bad.
Later in the day, while I was a walking zombie with a hangover and only cold cat-naps in the lat 36 hours, I met up with a couple of my friends from Colorado (home) that I had been partying with the night before (and was supposed to drive home). They took a cab back to the airport hotel, got up at about 9am grabbed a bus to downtown and as they enterred the convention center a 501st trooper asked if they were looking for the Lucas line. They figured they would miss Lucas because of getting drunk, sleeping in, and skipping the line. Needless to say, they said "sure, where's the Lucas line" and were pretty much escorted into the 3rd panel without any waiting in line and sat only about 10 rows and one section over from where I was.
GenCon :emperor &
:emperor
-theropod
