Well another Dragoncon has come and gone. It was a good year and somehow I didn’t come home feeling like absolute crap? LIke my feet are still sore and my little toes are still slightly numb but otherwise I don’t feel as exhausted as I usually do.
Anyway let’s recap it all….
I can’t remember if I posted our badge ribbons we were handing out?
I was giving out bun squad ribbons to anyone with cool space hair, mostly focusing on Leias, Padmes and Reys. I gave out a ton at the Leia shoot Friday, and I ran out by our panel Sunday afternoon!
Chase had Jackie Daytona ribbons and he didn’t start handing them out til Saturday night, so we ended up with some leftover. We’ll take them back next year.
In my last post I mentioned we bought a new cooler for the trip:
Well, when we started loading everything in the car Tuesday morning, guess what didn’t fit? We had to move everything back over to our smaller, older cooler and that’s the only way everything fit!
(We also had to leave behind Chase’s Leto costume, but he didn’t really want to wear it anyway)
Our 2 big bins fit in nicely – mine is the one with all the stickers LOL
And then here’s everything else stuck in with it, garment bags, duffel bags, 2 boxes and the cooler.
Drive in was quick and uneventful. No truck fires this year.
Headless Lion
After our yearly fight at the front desk with the Marriott, we got to our room and then did a walk around to see the Hilton’s decorations:
And the new Hyatt carpet:
Then we just chilled out for a while. I didn’t do much unpacking because the front desk was being stubborn about letting us stay in the same room for the next day (we had 2 back to back reservations – one for Tuesday night and then one for the rest of the week. We’ve done this plenty of times before and they’ve never had an issue with it, but this year they were all “no promises”)
We had KBBQ for dinner! It was yummy.
When we got back to the hotel we decided to see if somebody different was at the front desk who could take care of keeping us in the same room, and magically this new person at the desk set us up with no issues. Typical Marriott, just gotta find the right person to talk to.
So with that out of the way I did start taking things out of garment bags so they weren’t squished up in there for another night.
I went to take a shower later that night only to have no hot water. Front desk said to leave the water running for 20-30 minutes and yep by like 20 minutes it finally got hot and was mostly fine the rest of the weekend.
Wednesday morning we both woke up sore because the beds and pillows SUCKED. Like I can usually sleep anywhere on anything but both of my ears hurt from the Marriott pillows that were obviously filled with rock. So we found a target, bought new pillows and a few other things, then had breakfast at a place nearby.
I did not put him like this – the pillows were so bad I was using grogu as a pillow, then tried the beach towel I had had my leia helmet wrapped in… both fell off the bed overnight and ended up like this LOL
Then I spent the afternoon ironing and steaming. Like literally every costume needed something ironed or steamed. Took about 2 hours, ugh.
Wednesday night – Chase wore a costume and I DIDN’T… I wore normal clothes! He and some of our friends were Smut Busters from the Righteous Gemstones.
We went and had drinks at Trader Vic’s and then went to dinner with friends at a restaurant across from the Hyatt – I had 2 short ribs over the weekend and this place’s was the superior.
Just kinda chilled the rest of the night.
Thursday morning!
I put on my new Star Wars outfit for badge pickup.
We got our badges, not a huge wait, maybe a half hour at most. After that Chase realized he couldn’t find his sunglasses, and we figured he must have left them in the car in the parking garage. Well unfortunately we didn’t do what we usually do and take a pic of where we parked, so going back to the car was a very hot, sweaty trek up and down parking garage stairs trying to find the car. Finally found it but I was feeling gross and overheated by then. We went to have tacos for lunch and I couldn’t eat much because I still felt awful after all that.
After that it was finally time to get in costume.
Wore my pink 18th century dress from 2015 with the blonde Marie Antoinette wig from 2011. The wig had definitely seen better days, but it was nice to bring the pink dress back. When I wore it in 2015 I had so many problems with it and got so hot and panicky with how crowded it was, I only wore it for like an hour and mot of that was upstairs by our room just taking pics. In 2018 I reworked a lot of it, made it more comfortable to wear, finally got the bustling the way I wanted. So it was nice for this costume to get a “redemption” wear. I got a lot of nice compliments on it, including one of the food booth employees wanting to buy it for their wedding dress LOL
And it was fun to play Barbie. All of the Barbie costumes and mashups over the weekend were so fun!
After that I put on Jedi training Leia:
Ok so I got that brand new fancy lightsaber but only played with it once before dragoncon. So it took me and Chase both messing with it for about 15-20 minutes just to get on, volume low, and blue LOL So after that I was scared to turn it off and have to go through all that again, so I left it on.
Thanks to IG dragonconcosplayers who got this one of us together!
Well then I dicked around and went and ate ice cream with my lightsaber on the whole time and it died before we could take any photos. So I realized I was gonna have to plug it in and squeeze it in somewhere else in the weekend to get some pics. Blargh
Went back to get it plugged in and I switched to Seven of Nine.
I’ll do a whole write up about my thoughts on each new costume in a separate post. But overall was very happy with this.
We had dinner at Sear (second short rib – this one was fine but not as good as the other place) and then Chase got into Beefsquatch for the rest of the night.
And I got pics with Boimler and a bunny Seven of Nine!
Also Thursday was SO crowded and one of the elevators on our bank was down all day, so elevators sucked that day. Thankfully they had it fixed by friday and the rest of the weekend, elevators were ok.
Friday morning I was up bright and early for the Leia photoshoot!
Well, the facebook event page said 10, but I got over there right at 10 and no Leias to be found. Instead, we got swept up in the horde of Barbies… no complaints!
Finally I opened the app and the app said the Leia shoot was at 11. Not sure what the disconnect was there. Maybe facebook was still showing it to me in central time?
Leia shoot was lots of fun, got to catch up with lots of folks I haven’t seen since… well, last Leia shoot LOL
After that was over, I went and got into my trek dress for our away mission to the dealer’s room…
We managed to do all 4 floors – rather quickly, but we got through them all. I bought 2 things – Megan Lara’s new Padme print, and a pennant of Tim Curry from The Worst Witch. Got something for Ash, and Chase got a Cap action figure he’s been wanting forever.
After that my feet were killing me so back to the hotel to change. We had a nap and I changed into Breha and Chase got into Bail for the big Star Wars shoot.
We didn’t actually participate in the shoot. After last we year we decided to sit it out. We like going and seeing people and taking pics, but not so much standing up on the steps for ages in the heat while they get everybody lined up only to be a tiny dot in the back. No shade on the big photoshoots, it’s just the nature of the beast. We still went to see folks and hang out.
We were really hoping to find a little Leia to get pics with but alas.
Like I said earlier I’ll do a separate post on thoughts on the new costumes.
And of course I forgot to hand my phone to anybody to at least get one shot of us together, so back to my time honored tradition of having to photoshop us into the same pic LOL
Time to change again for late night shenanigans and dinner with Cath. I put on the new Scully look which I was really happy with considering it was just a bunch of clothes I either already had, bought from amazon and a wig I restyled.
Didn’t really get any good pics of it though.
Had dinner at High Velocity and then got to hang out with Cat for a while!
Crazy somebody’s badge ribbon beard is already this long on friday night!
Saturday morning and we had a tiny little snippet of the parade from our window:
I got into my Star Trek dress and we did a little walk around, taking pics and saying hi to folks.
Then it was time for our SNW photo!
Somebody blinked in our first pic, the photographer said “I’m not saying who!” but we got to get a second pic so that was fun!
We decided to just grab some little pizzas in the Marriott for lunch. I told Chase I was going on up because my feet hurt. As I walked up to the elevator bank, an elevator immediately opened, completely empty, I walked right on, and went straight up to our floor. How???
Then had to quickly change into Arwen for our Elijah Wood/Sean Astin pic. AKA Cath’s dream come true. Seriously she’s been waiting on Elijah to come to dcon for yeaaaaaaars.
>After a short rest and dinner we got into Nadja and Laszlo (Jackie Daytona)
We spent the night walking around, people watching, and taking selfies with all the other vampires we found.
I should’ve had Chase put a little bit of guyliner on.
We stayed in these costumes until I finally had to tap out from heat.
Sunday dawned with me getting into Jessica…
We went over to the hilton for some photos and video.
Then Chase got to meet Gina Torres:
She was so nice!
Then I had to get into Padme for the Padme panel:
I was so worried about being late I ended up being downstairs an hour early. So we stood in the atrium level just chatting with folks and looking at costumes.
The panel went really well! Standing room only!
Thanks to my friends who sent me pics of the panel since Chase didn’t take any 😛 LOL
After a little nap Chase and I got into our Rebels Vader and Leia for our mini rebels group with Jess!
I was mostly handling for Chase while wearing this. We’ll be bringing these back next year with an expanded group!
This little girl just LOVED Vader LOL
After that we headed up to change – I needed to throw on Jedi Training Leia again to get some pics.
Got all the way over to the hilton patio before I realized… I forgot to put my freaking spats on!!!!!!!
So had to take some more pics when we got back to the room LOL
I threw Scully on again and we went and head dinner with Cath at the hilton so we could get the bob-omb dessert.
After that we were gonna go walk around a bit more but Chase wanted to go to bed early since we had to be up early the next day.
I felt like I didn’t get a proper goodbye this year.
When we leave on Mondays we like to get up and get out, so we were up at 5:45AM and ready to go as soon as the bell stand opened 6AM.
I liked the sight of this man packing up his skeletons to take home.
Drive home was uneventful. I slept most of the way. We got home and had to make a target run for some necessities – mainly cat food and litter.
Like I said, I’ll do another post with specific thoughts on everything I wore.
And also like I said at the beginning – today, Thursday after dragoncon, I’m feeling like… weirdly great. I slept amazing last night. Only complaint… my little toes are still numb from wearing heels all weekend LOL