Here’s the pics from my camera and my phone, and a handful from Chase – haven’t gotten all of his uploaded yet.
We had a fantastic time! It was definitely a different crowd than we’re used to at a convention, but Kevin was in Kevin Heaven.
We were up before the sun on Friday and the trip in went really fast. We made a pitstop at the Engineer Guy for some supplies and then headed to the Marriott Marquis.
Kevin has ALWAYS wanted to go to Dragoncon, but I’ve always felt it would be too overwhelming for him. So this gave him sort of a “mini Dragoncon” experience, including staying in the Marriott. First weird thing – not even filling up one bell cart with our stuff:
Got checked in and unloaded, and I threw on Donna and took Kevin on a tour, then put on Belldandy and we had an early dinner at the food court.
(Nooooobody behind me on the Marriott floor. weird.)
I put on the wings after dinner, but I guess I’m no spring chicken anymore. Can’t do them for hours, could only manage about 20 minutes before I had to get them off. Oh well. Got some nice shots with Chase before then. It was neat to be wearing this here again. At Dragoncon 2003 I wore this exact same costume – I had planned to enter the anime costume contest in it, but had a hard time finding an elevator I could fit on with the wings. Eventually we had to take my wings off, Cath took one, Ash took one, and we each went down separately as we could find space in the elevators. After all that I ended up being late and they wouldn’t let me enter 🙁 So I just hung out in the costume for a while. Sorry for getting off track – I just think it’s neat to be back with it in the same location around a decade later 🙂
Second weird thing, not much people watching on the AL. The big open floor only had 2-3 people on it most of them time, and on Sunday they had it completely blocked off for an outside event, so that was just so weird.
I put on Donna again (Even though I wore Donna 3 times over the weekend – each time only averaged about 20 minutes total) and took Kevin to the game room. We played on the arcade games for a while, then I put on normal clothes and we went to visit Atlanta friends, and then as we were about to head back to the hotel, decided we wanted a late night snack. We found a pizza place and each had a slice of pizza (2nd dinner, so hobbity) and then back to the hotel.
Saturday morning we got up and had breakfast at the buffet (part of our room deal), and then walked over to the Hilton to get an idea of what the crowd was like. Went back to the room and put on Meg as a test run (planned to wear it again later in the day). Everything worked ok – at first. I did not use enough bobbie pins, basically, and had to move them all up front to keep it on, which HURT. I’ll post more about that later — but I didn’t last long in it, and had to take off the shoes and walk barefoot back to our room. I changed, we went and hung out in the lobby for a while and then had lunch in the food court.
(I’m still waiting to get more photos uploaded — will have more later)
Meanwhile, Kevin wore Harry Potter and got to meet a FABULOUS Hagrid.
After lunch, I put on Belle, which after Meg was a breath of fresh air. I let Kevin go over to the game room by himself, which I was worried about because it was kind of a maze to get there from our room, and he had no phone. But he agreed to meet us back over on the AL at 5:15. Chase and I wandered around and took pictures and saw friends. Since we were over at the Hilton and it was around 5, we decided to go ahead and get Kevin from the game room – but couldn’t find him. It was at this point my Belle shoes decided to go from being “vaguely stiff and uncomfortable” to “I hate you and i’m going to rub blisters all over your feet even though I’ve never done that before!” so after hobbling around searching for Kevin I finally just took them off. We decided to see if he’d gone back to the Marriott, since it was close to our meeting time. And guess what, there he was! I was very proud of the fact he’d gotten over there by himself and then back on time.
(Here’s Kevin wearing my Belldandy wings, since I have no Belle photos to post yet.)
Got into regular clothes for dinner and ended up eating at High Velocity, then Kevin and I went and explored. We walked over to the Hyatt, and then up to the top of the Marriott.
Then, back into costume. Kevin got into Harry Potter and got to take some great pictures with these amazing HP costumes:
It was the highlight of his year, I think.
I had put on Meg again, this time with some fixes, and it was infinitely more wearable (again, more about that later).
After packing up and going to bed, very early the next morning Kevin started feeling unwell, and my stomach hurt, too. All we could guess was that it was dinner. But thankfully it didn’t last long and we packed up and loaded up the car, and had Vortex for lunch. Then I got to go to Gail K Fabrics, which nearly made me cry because I wish we had a fabric store like that closer to Memphis.
As quick as the trip down seemed, the trip home felt like it went on forever – we got home around 7.
A few more pics coming up later, along with some more costume thoughts – here’s our Flickr gallery where I’ll be adding more.