Deciding to go to DragonCon was one of those last minute things. I mean really last minute things. silentq and I were at Velvet Underground in Toronto on a Thursday night having drinks with Midnight and Casper and Skerry when we decided to make the trip. By 10 AM Friday we were packed and in the car and by 4AM Saturday morning we were checking into a cheap motel just outside of Atlanta. In July. Ouch.

Actually, considering that we planned almost nothing about this trip, it went very smoothly. We didn't take my car, so we didn't have to deal with things falling off it all the way there and back. (Well there was that little incident with silentq's spoiler, but it was 4 in the morning and she forgave me so we won't mention that.)

We drove straight from Toronto to about an hour short of Atlanta in 18 hours. Ohio sticks out in my mind only for being very flat and very wide and having very many state troopers. Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia kind of of blended together after a while. Although I do remember thinking that the kids in these states must be exceptionally smart because almost every second car had one of those "My kid is an Honor Student at..." bumper stickers, which immediately makes everybody who sees it want to run out and buy a bumper sticker that says, "My kid bent your honor student over the shop class room table and buttfucked him until he squealed like an eight year-old girl." Unfortunately since we travelled thorough most of the Southern states at night we missed seeing all the scenery when we crossed through the mountains. I happen to love mountains.

DragonCon itself, once we got there, was an agrophobics version of hell. 22,000 people; half of whom were trying to get onto the elevators, (which mysteriously only ever went up) and the other half of whom were all trying to order drinks at the bar. And in the middle of the chaos two lost and overwhelmed Canadians, adrift and alone in a sea of Klingons that say "Y'all". (You ever wonder why nobody in SF ever has a southern accent? Could it be that alien species have the sense not to settle in places where it's that hot and bright all the damn time?)

In spite of the chaos, we did manage to find some people we knew. TSM discovered us hiding under the escalators and introduced us to his friends of whom there seemed to be a great number and who seemed to be in various stages of inebriation and undress for most of the weekend. Liz and the Random Floating Neuron were there and subsidizing their hotel room by renting out space to a village of migrant farm workers, so they kindly allowed us to take a few square feet of their floor to crash on. Everybody was very pleased to see us, saying things like, "What the hell are you doing here?" and "Stop stalking me."

We managed to catch a couple of panels while we there. My favourite was a spoken word performance called Gothic After Midnight, which was really well done. We also spent an hour in the dealers room waiting for a sushi restaurant to open, which, once it we able to get in, turned out not to have any actual sushi. TSM had to placate us by taking us for Mexican instead. Our main reason for coming to DragonCon was to see the bands, so of course we missed them all.

Godhead and Gwar were supposed to be playing on the Saturday night and we had already missed everybody else. As it turned out we hung around for over two hours after the bands were supposed to be starting before we got fed up with the waiting, claustrophobic from the crowds and pissed off by the somewhat heavy-handed security and decided to go to a club instead. In this case it was one that was a fair distance from the hotel and running a shuttle bus. To kill time while we were waiting for the bus we went for a beer in the restaurant because the bar was looking progressively more like the scene of some interspecies riot. This is how we discovered that the best way to truly traumatize the waitstaff at the Hyatt Regancy in Atlanta is to say the word "drink" to them in the middle of a convention. Their eyes would glaze over as they stared over at the bar in mindless terror and they would flee from us never to be seen again. We had almost run through the entire staff before we were finally able to get a single beer each by the time-honoured method of taking hostages. Some times the old ways are the best, y'know?

So the shuttle finally arrives and it turns out to be a smallish bus with televisions showing some rather uninspiring BDSM movies. Call me unsophisticated but I think I actually prefer cheap porn because the women don't all look like clones with different coloured hair. Anorexics with implants politely tapping each other's butts doesn't really do it for me. Listening to TSM heckle them to "put your back into it!", on the other hand, was much more entertaining.

The bus travelled for long enough to make me wonder if this was actually part of some secret plot to get us back to Canada, but they finally stopped and let us off in front of some big warehouse looking building with a painting of Elvis on the front of it. (I just can't escape him.) So we get into the club and after lounging around on the big comfy chairs and listeing to doof-doof music for an hour, we discover that if you follow a secret passage through the back of the bathrooms, knock twice and say the secret word, you find another room with some decent music and, of course, a public fetish performance going on.

There seems to be a big tradeoff between people who look good in fetishwear and people who look good doing scenes. Most of the women who seem to get hired for dress-up-in-a-few-leather-straps-and-smack-people-around jobs barely look capable of lifting a flogger, never mind applying it with any appreciable force or endurance. Although I can imagine that from the club's point of view it makes economic sense to have very light scenes that can go on for a very long time (I mean... they do pay these people... right?) from a voyeur's standpoint a few shorter scenes that were well done would be a lot more effective. At the very least get some people who like each other up there. Sheesh.

Back on the bus, and more bad fetish-porn films. Oh, and the obligatory annoying drunk chick on the bus who wanted to make sure that everybody there knew that she was Young, Cute and Not Wearing Very Many Clothes. Not that I have anything against girls who are Young, Cute and Not Wearing Very Many Clothes, but I think that some things should be allowed to speak for themselves.

By the time we got back to the hotel we were more than a little punchy, so we headed up to our room, cleared a space among the rest of the foreigners, kicked the pig to get it to move over and stop snoring and proceded to pass out for the night.

Since we were already so close, we decided to drop by Florida and visit Jealousy. The first time I called him his first words to me on the phone -- before hello -- were, "What the fuck are you doing in Atlanta?" He also refused to give us directions to his house. We were undaunted, however, and determined that once we figured out how to get back on the highway, we would head south.

The getting to the highway part was going to be tricky though. For it was the day known to Americans as "The Forth of July". And looking down from our lofty perch on the hotel room balcony, we could see the streets lined with people sucking on red-white-and-blue popsicles and slowly roasting in the sun. Yes, they were having a parade. Right across the front doors of the hotel.

Funny how they never mention this kind of stuff in the convention brochures.

Getting from the hotel to the car was very simple, it merely involved dashing across the parade route at risk of life and limb. Getting the car back to the hotel to get our stuff, however, required driving around the entire state of Georgia and back and then carting our 47 metric tonnes of luggage across the 37 miles of barbed wire to the only parking spot we had been able to find. That accomplished, we continued on our journey.

Florida is a very flat state. And very very bright. Even the plants scare me, there is just something about all those spikes and spines on plants that is disturbingly alien. silentq and I screamed in unison when the first palm trees came into view. And the kudzu that is all over the south is just freaky stuff, it reminds me of the moss that grows over people and swallows them up in some Stephen King novel.

Another disturbing feature about the southern US is the food. It's gotta be about 50% grease by volume. At one point we walked into a Cracker Barrel (No, that's really what it's called, I'm not making that up.) and I nearly lost Nicole completely, she bolted after a plastic singing rosebush made a lunge for her. I was forced to lure her back into the building with clove candies.

Once we were in Gainseville, Jealousy consented to give us directions to the House o' Penguins, although he did make a final attempt to avoid us by sending us to the wrong street. Oh, and next time I crash on somebody's floor I am going to find out in advance where they hide the damn coffee. Chocolate, however, will do as an effective substitute in a pinch.

Our hosts decided to take us out and show us some of the countryside, figuring that since we were Canadian obviously we would want to see the aligators. They brought us to some place they called a "prairie". I would have used the word, "swamp" myself, but felt that it was impolite to argue. So while while the LBG, silentq and I stood on the long wooden pier that extended out over the "prairie" and admired the birds, Jealousy tried to forcibly drag out the aligators who very sensibly made themselves scarce.

Since he was determined we were going to see an aligator before we left, we drove further into the "prairie" -- not "jungle" mind you, -- and went for a long hike. We saw a deer and lots more birds but no aligators. At one point on our walk the LBG spotted some fairly large birds off amongst the trees, and pointed them out to us. We found out later that they were wild turkeys, and apparently the one animal that nobody in Jealousy's family has ever successfully been able to kill on a hunt. Of course we didn't know this at the time, all we could see was Jealousy bounding off through the trees and screaming, "YOU BASTARDS!" at the top of his lungs while the birds ran away giggling.

Once we had finally tracked down the errant Jealousy and disentangled him from the carniverous kudzu, the four of us went for dinner -- Mexican again. Well the Gainesville version of Mexican, which isn't actually very Mexican but which comes with really big honkin' marguaritas so you tend not to notice.

Sated with the excitement of Gainesville, we made plans to head home by a somewhat different route so that we could take the opportunity to annoy even more of our friends. On the way we accidently found out where Waldo is. It's in Florida. We also found out why everybody is looking for it. It contains some kind of a rift in the space-time continuum, so that from an east-bound highway you can turn right and end up travelling north. It managed this without the highways ever crossing over each other, something I've never seen anywhere else. Well, once in Montreal, but the French are a special case.

Just before leaving the state of Florida we passed three more turkeys. They waved to us as we drove by.

We drove through South Carolina. There is nothing in South Carolina. Not a thing. Actually that's not true, there is a Deliverence Road in South Carolina. We didn't stop there.

We then drove into North Carolina to Charlotte to visit TSM on his home turf. He wouldn't give us directions to his house either, leading silentq and I to come to the conclusion that none of our male friends really know where they live. Once we were actually there, however, TSM found us, and was so pleased to see us that he ran a red light in our honour. Surprisingly enough, he did not take us out for Mexican.

The next day's drive from North Carolina to Pittsburgh completely sated my desire to see mountains. Oh boy, was I sated. We called Xthlc on the way to let him know we were going to be dropping in on him, and he did give us directions to his house, but we had a map so we managed to find it anyway. Since we were anxious to get home by now we didn't stay long, just long enough to join him and XyD for, you guessed it, Mexican. This was considerably more authentic Mexican than the food in Gainesville, complete with the traditional and ceremonial dumping of water on the customers.

Food eaten and fortified with as much caffeine as I could take we finished the drive home and made it back into Toronto at 4 in the morning. We were finally home, a week later, with no permanent damage to anybody involved. Well, just the spoiler, but we agreed we weren't going to mention that.

The next day it was off to Toronto Trek with the wives. I can now honestly say that I have seen enough Darth Mauls to last me for the rest of my entire life.

All maps courtesy of Mapquest.

Last updated on November 19 1999.

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