…Jack!
Critter Con 14
Day Zero: In which I have much to tell you, Gentle Reader.
As it often is when I write these Day Zero entries, it is early in the morning. 6:15 am, Friday, July 30th, to be exact. While I am awake, showered, fed and drinking my beloved tea, everyone else is sacked out hard on the Bus.
This year “everyone” turns out to be a fairly small crew, by our standards.
Me
Grace
Sasha (and her spidermantis, Flora)
Sam (Sasha’s boyfriend)
Cupcake (and her 3 guinea pigs, Hermione, Gini and Luna)
Tucker (Cupcake’s bestie)
Spike Jones
Mary Jones
And that’s it. Other friends will meet us at the con, which will have about 60% of the usual crowd, all of whom must be fully vaccinated to even enter Critter City. Brownie, Mara, the babies, Omar, and Amy will not be attending the con and won’t be back in our reality until sometime next May.
So, a few updates…
1: Nobody has died! After a couple of years of seeing memorial statues to family members, we will be glad NOT to see them this year.
2: Sweetie redecorated the whole living area! The living room looks like a more sofa oriented Victorian men’s club, while the dining room is straight up 1950s diner. Bedrooms range from old west themed to Star Trek to swanky 1920s New York hotel suite. The bathrooms match the bedrooms. Our bar is about twice as long and has a new Smart Droid, Bogie, as a more or less full time bartender. Yes, he looks and sounds just like Bogart.
3: All other rooms got less drastic upgrades, but the Slide Room has once again doubled in size.
4: Our CritterCon Memories room now has hundreds of holograms from all the previous years, so you can watch our various wacky adventures in full color, motion and sound. In miniature, of course.
5: We have a 100% no shit 1950s/60s Las Vegas Lounge! The musical acts change at random, but a couple of weeks ago we had Louis Prima, Keely Smith, Sam Butera, and the Witnesses. It was great! So great, that I named the lounge Prima’s. Our bartenders here are Sammy & Dino.
As I said last year, this year will have zero timey wimey or reality hopping shit going on, barring emergencies. Our route is pretty straightforward. We’ll go down Highway 99 to Bakersfield, catch I-5 through the Los Angeles metroplex to San Diego, then turn east and head to Critter City, Texas. The trip will take 5 days, with us rolling into the dome Wednesday morning.
I said last year that we’d be visiting all new roadside attractions and we sure will! We should be hitting two per day on this trip, as well as a couple on the three day trip home, which will just be me, Grace, Sasha, and Sam.
So that’s your Day Zero update, although Day One will be starting in about 5 minutes. I’ll post that report later tonight.
Programming note: The critters will not be commenting throughout my trip report like they have in the past. However, the daily convention reports will be entirely written by Cupcake and Tucker.
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