Tag: San Diego

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We made it to San Diego after a longer than expected midday drive. (Traffic between Carlsbad and the San Diego city limits was a nightmare.) After checking into the hotel, we stopped for a snack and then headed out to the convention center to pick up our badges for Comic-Con. It went a lot more smoothly than last year, probably due to actually having confirmation notices. (Though I did end up having to run around looking for the press desk for the CBR gig.)

One note: For the first time in four years, we were actually asked to show our trolley tickets. You have been warned.

People waiting for Preview NightWe had tickets to see Avenue Q tonight, so instead of staying for Preview Night with everyone else (and there were lots of people waiting to get in at the time we left, about half an hour before the doors opened at 6), we went to dinner at Dussini, the Mediterranean restaurant that replaced the Spaghetti Factory a couple of years ago.

Then we walked over to the Spreckels Theater, which was interesting. It’s inside an office building, and you get from the lobby to the balcony by taking the regular office elevators to the third floor. Then they check your tickets.

Anyway, good show, highly recommended if the idea of raunchy puppets doesn’t disturb you.

Tomorrow we go to the con proper, and my con report should appear at Comics Should Be Good.

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It took an hour and four minutes, but I managed to book a hotel for Comic-Con International this morning. (Yes, it’s not until July. And I still want to call it San Diego Comic Con.) Last year I was unable to get through online or by phone, but had no problems faxing the reservation request.

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.** Continue reading →

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Here’s the latest round of strange sights from San Diego.

[Outhouse on a crane]We stayed at the Radisson Harbor View. The end of the hallway had a view of the harbor, but our room had a view of the construction across the street. When we first stepped onto the balcony, we saw a crane lifting an outhouse up to the topmost floor of the site. There’s something inherently absurd about a port-a-potty flying through the air.

We walked up and down Cedar Ave. from the hotel to the Little Italy trolley stop at least once a day, stopping at the same It’s a Grind coffee house we frequented two years ago. Strangely, we didn’t notice this message on the street until our last day in town:

No SBC to India

Now, it may look like a tagger’s commentary on outsourcing, but it makes more sense if you happen to know that India Street is just a block away.

Apartment high-rise with identical balconies... and one red umbrella.There were quite a few high-rise buildings that looked very much like this one. Sort of the skyscraper equivalent of clone homes, I suppose. This one had one difference: One of the tenants had set up a large, red umbrella on their balcony.

Moving on to the Gaslamp Quarter, we saw—but didn’t photograph—a club called Tsunami Beach. I don’t know about you, but if there’s a tsunami, the last place I want to be is on the beach!

This next one was actually pretty neat. The window boxes outside Dussini (a Mediterranean restaurant on Fifth Avenue) are full of low-water plants. Practical, low-maintenance, and still decorative.

Windows box with low-water plants

Finally, here’s a sign from somewhere along the 5, elsewhere in San Diego:

Fish and Richardson

I think it’s pretty safe to say that Richardson isn’t a fish…

Next: con-specific weirdness.

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I mentioned that on Saturday, we left Comic-Con for a few hours to check out the ships at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. We saw five:

  • The Star of India, billed as “the world’s oldest active ship”
  • The HMS Surprise, a replica of an 18th century British ship.
  • The Berkeley, an 1898 steam ferry
  • The Medea, a 1904 yacht
  • A B-39 Soviet submarine.

The big attractions, of course, were the Star of India and the HMS Surprise. Naturally, the Star of India was closed when we got there.

Star of India as seen from a porthole in the Surprise
The Star of India seen from the Surprise

The Surprise was fun, though. It turns out it was built in the 1970s as a replica of an 18th century British Royal Navy vessel, the HMS Rose. It was sold to 20th Century Fox in 2001 and used to film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. After filming was complete, the museum bought the ship and renamed it the HMS Surprise in honor of the fictional vessel.

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Last week, Mark Evanier wrote about media coverage of Comic-Con that exaggerated the number of people in costume.

I think it was Saturday afternoon that I noticed a huge cluster of people in really good hall costumes, all ringing the G4 TV booth. I noticed the words, “For the next two hours…” scrolling by on the teleprompter, and realized they were probably trying to film an intro to their con report with all the cosplayers in the background.

No wonder people get the impression that everyone dresses up!

For the record: Katie dressed as a pirate on Saturday. Ironically, she got more attention for the Serenity T-shirt she wore on Friday. I just wore a T-shirt and shorts all four days.

Katie as a pirate

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Sunday at SDCC was, oddly, more crowded than Saturday. Maybe it was the desperation of the last day combined with the fact that it was still on the weekend. We got in later, closer to 11:30, since we spent the morning packing.

I did a final round of back-issue hunting, and ended up not buying anything. All the Golden Age Flash books were high-grade, and therefore out of my price range. Unfortunately I forgot to check eBay this morning, because several auctions I’d put off bidding on ended before we got home.

I hit two panels: First Fables, which was basically the entire creative team of the book and the spinoff, Jack of Fables, and was great fun. They also announced the upcoming “burning questions” issue. They’ll take questions from readers, and put together a bunch of one– or two-page stories to answer them.

The other panel was for Lord of the Rings. People from New Line Home Video, EA Games, Games Workshop, and Topps Cards all talked about their new tie-ins. At least, they did after the 15-minute attempt to get the screen properly hooked up to both the DVD player and the laptop. I’m annoyed that they’re releasing another DVD edition (this set has the theatrical version and the extended version on one double-sided disc—no, they’re not making more changes to the films, thank the Eldar), but the Battle for Middle Earth II expansion pack, Rise of the Witch-King, looks pretty cool. Too bad I’m not any good at real-time strategy games.

We left the con around 4:00, had dinner back in Little Italy, then got on the road around a quarter to six. 2½ hours later, we were home.

It’s odd how quickly you get used to the walking. After the first day, my feet were sore from walking and my shoulders were sore from carrying my backpack. They were still bad the next morning, but better by evening, and by the third day, they were perfectly fine. (Well, except for the blister on my toe.)

Still, I think I’m going to be a zombie at work tomorrow. Next year, it might be worth taking the following Monday off as well.

Anyway, stay tuned. I’ll be posting photos (cosplay, weirdness, and possibly sightseeing)—and with any luck, quotes as well—sometime in the next few days.