Our Wizard World Weekend

It was fun, but it didn't come easily at all. I forgot my wallet on the plane, so we had to wait a half an hour to get it back. It took more time to get lunch, but eventually we started out from Burbank to go to Los Angeles. If there was a poorly-marked freeway junction or exit, I picked the wrong one every time. Lots of backtracking!

This year, Wizard World took place at the L.A. Convention Center, so I had to learn a new route (last year's convention was in Long Beach). L.A. proper is similar to San Diego in that it has a lot of one-way streets, making navigation difficult if you haven't been there before (or often, like me). More backtracking. At last, we located and parked at the Sheraton, whose parking structure wasn't easy to figure out either - neither of us could easily figure out where the valet parking ended and the standard parking began!

On top of that, the fellow at Expedia was wrong about how far it was from the hotel to the convention center. I thought it was a block or two. It was eight. Plus, the L.A. Marathon was last Saturday as well, so it wasn't easy to walk over there.

We finally made our way over to the convention center. Hooray! Comic time! Toy time! Well, not quite.

The first thing we saw in the center was a huge Christian revival-style meeting. Huh. Oh! - there's another event further along - that must be it. Nope - that was an organizing area for the marathon. So we kept walking. And walking.

It turns out that the L.A. Convention Center is as big as an airport, and naturally, Wizard World was at the opposite end. I think there were at least five events in the center that day. I'd never run into that before!

Anyway, we had fun at the convention. It was a little small (about the size of this year's WonderCon, maybe a little smaller), and there wasn't much in the way of panels or forums, so we mostly cruised the dealer's room with our friend Dave (it took him even longer to arrive, as he had to park his car - poor guy). This was a big statue weekend for me - I bought a three-maquette set of characters from the new Krypto animated TV show, as well as a couple of silver age X-Men statues that I got for cheap. Of course, I'll probably spend all the money I saved trying to get the whole team, as a couple of the figures are pretty rare. I ran into Stephen Silver, and got to say hello and peruse his beautiful artwork. I'll have to see if he does commissions!

We also got together for dinner with the Johnson family on Saturday night, so that was very nice. Victoria prepared a chicken curry that was quite tasty, and we topped off the evening with a few rounds of Apples To Apples. Fun, but I couldn't play to save my life! Dave was there, too.

We got together with him again to look over the convention more on Sunday, since we hadn't finished the day before. After lunch, we sneaked into the center's empty theater and recorded an interview with him for his podcast (I'll let you know when it's online, so can listen to it if you want). It was getting late, so we headed out for the airport.

Traffic was heavy, so we didn't make it back for the departure time. Fortunately, our flight was delayed, so we made it anyway. Phew! At least our wonky travel karma didn't extend to car accidents or plane schedules.

Well, we're back now, so I guess the lesson is that traffic is temporary, and toys last a lot longer!