…so I might as well report something about hotels for the Comic-Con. A friend of mine writes me that he has had to cancel his trip due to lack of an affordable place to stay. Says he, he had a reservation at a motel in Chula Vista, which is about fifteen minutes from the Convention Center. Then a story appeared in a San Diego newspaper that said hotels were getting $500 a night for rooms during the con, and his motel cancelled his reservation and told him he could have it back but the price would now be $700 a night. (I gather they can do this because he hadn't paid in advance for the first night.) This is for a motel room that — I just looked — advertises normal rates of $52-$62 on the Internet.
Out of curiosity, since I already have my hotel room, I just used Travelaxe, which is a wonderful and free piece o' software that can usually find you the cheapest lodgings on the web, and looked for a room for Thursday night through Sunday morn in or around San Diego. Couldn't find anything under around a thousand bucks for three nights…and these were at places that are 10+ miles away from the Convention Center and ordinarily go for less than a hundred a night.
Back in the seventies, I had a friend who lived in Los Angeles and commuted each day to the San Diego Con. That is, instead of getting a room down there, he drove home each night and slept in his own bed. Hotel rooms were something like $20 a night then and there was no shortage…but he calculated the gas prices and decided that by going back and forth, he'd save enough cash to buy a copy of some old issue of Action Comics after which he lusted. We razzed him and pointed out that he was foregoing 5-7 hours of convention each day and spending it instead on the 5 Freeway, which is always a joy. We thought he was insane then…but like a lot of people we label insane, he may just have been ahead of his time.