So the day started out pretty good, I finished packing up stuff as I knew I wanted to leave around noon because I had to go pick my a Ethan (Guild intern) from a friends house in San Diego as he was going to be my roommate. So I load up my jeep and get a quick lesson on how to use Harry's GPS. I begin my joureny south but first fill up on gas.I hit the road and for the most part things go smoothly, there was traffic here and there but nothing like it was last year where it took me 11 hours to get down there. This time it was a little over three hours. I pick up Ethan and then we head furthur into San Diego and to "Little Italy" where our hotel is.
We check in around 4pm and decide to shower and rest for a bit as we didn't have to meet everyone until 5:30pm. The hotel was a healty 30 minute walk. We get to the convention center around 5:45pm and it's packed. Since this was preview night the hall was open from 6pm to 9pm.
Ethan went to find Kim who had his pass while I stood in the "Professional" line to pick up my passes. This line was huge but surprisely took only about a half hour to get thru. Once in I went to the Guild's booth to say hi as I was not suppose to work the booth until the weekend, but as soon as I get there the cast had just started to sign autographes and there was a huge mass of people and I got sucked into helping with crowd control. Three hours later as the hall was closing I was released from my duties. So even though I wasn't schedule to work it was a good thing I was there as they needed all hands on deck for that signing.
During this time I got to meet some very cool Guildie fans, these are folks that I have talked to, either voice or text chat, online. One fan named Ryan reconized me from my avatar, as he was standing in line he asked me about my podcast Knights of the Guild. I was kind of surprised and flattered that someone reconized me. We stuck up a conversation and I gave him some KOTG swag. I didn't have t-shirt on me so I told him to come back and I would give him one of those too. I also got to be long time online buddies Dani, Nas and Eva. We have talked many times in Watchtheguild.com chat forum and it was great to finally meet them face to face.
After the signing we all (Jenni, Stuart, Ethan, Dani, Nas, Eva and a few others) decided to go grab some dinner. As the Con was just let out things were a mad house as we looked for a resturant that we weren't going to have to wait two hours to eat. After several tries and the group almost giving up we found a place called Nicky Rottens' Bar and Burger Joint. They were able to seat us all in like ten minutes. Sean Becker and Ferny Chien joined us along with some other Guildies.. we all chatted and had a great time. Somewhere around midnight the dinner party was over and everyone started to head back to thier hotels as we were all getting up early for the first day of con.
All in all it was a crazy but fun first day.. and this is only the beginning.
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