Amtrak ran a bit late but the train was way more comfy than flying…and given how long in advance airlines want you to check in now, not that much longer. Hey, how about driving? Nope, no way, forget about it. The older I get, the less I like to drive anywhere and especially long trips. So the train was jes' fine for us.
What to say? I liked the Hyatt a lot more than Heidi MacDonald but she's basically right about everything else. The big story was, of course, the teeming mass of humanity (I'm being a bit loose with the language here) that descended — or in some cases, tried to descend — on the convention center. A tip for next year's con: Register in advance or don't go.
And by the way: I'm not sure that there isn't some convention rule against this but if there isn't, I'm going to throw out a free idea by which someone could make themselves a ton o' money: Sell bottles of water cheaper than the convention center vendors. Your basic 16.9 ounce bottle of Crystal Geyser drinking H2O (those little bottles that all say they're filled by someone named "CG Roxane") sell for about 25 cents each at the market near me and they're even cheaper at Costco. Those are retail prices but even if you paid that, you could sell them for $1.25 each and make a tidy profit, even after paying for your table and a couple of tubs of ice. The concessions at the convention center were getting $2.50 for a bottle of water…and it was even worse than that.
You get in line, wait five or ten minutes and finally, when you reach the front, you say, "Two bottles of water, please." And you figure they're going to hand you, for your five dollars, two of the 16.9 ounce bottles they have on display. Logical, right?
Only they don't do that. They hand you two twelve ounce bottles of Dasani…which, first of all, isn't as good a drinking water (purified as opposed to natural spring). And secondly, instead of getting 16.9 ounces for your $2.50, you're getting twelve ounces. For two and a half bucks, they can't give you the slightly larger size which costs them maybe two cents more? Plus, of course, it's sort of misleading advertising…and you'll usually go along with it because you're thirsty and tired and you need to be somewhere for a panel and you don't really want to spend another ten minutes in line to see if the next vendor over has larger bottles. (Based on my unscientific survey, they did not.) In a hall where one could find plenty of rip-offs, this was the rip-offiest.
Hmm…I think I just complained about that for more paragraphs than it's worth. But that's sometimes the kind of guy I am.
I'll write more after I unpack.