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DAY ONE
The Con officially opens its doors at 9:30 am every day, and programming usually starts a half hour later. We've long outgrown the thrill of arriving before 9:30 and pressing our noses against the Convention Center windows, but I still like to get there within that first half-hour so I feel like I'm getting our money's worth.
Sam has some preferences also. They're pretty simple:
1. Breakfast is a must.
2. Whatever time I decide to wake him up in the morning, I'm to take a
deep breath and wait an extra hour.
Delorean jokes aside, I haven't yet acquired the knack of bending time and space, so if Sam wants to get breakfast, and I want to arrive at the Con in a timely fashion, then Sam's preferred rising time will take the bullet. Being the reasonable guy I am, I have no problem with this, but Sam's not a morning person. Folks observing our breakfast conversation usually think I'm brushing up on my ventriloquist act. since Sam is usually focusing all his mental resources on remembering who he is and where he's at, and resisting the urge to strangle me.
Most hotels offer a continental breakfast. I still haven't figured out which continent defines breakfast as a roll and a cup of coffee or juice, but it's not any place I'd like to visit. Maybe that's how breakfast was served on Atlantis, which might explain why it's the only continent that's been conveniently misplaced. At any rate, the Hampton Inn offers something a bit more respectable than guests like us deserve... along with the croissants, coffee and juice, there's bagels, cereal, yogurt, and a waffle-iron set-up for fresh waffles. There's also hot scrambled eggs and a breakfast-meat-of-the-day. While we were there, they served bacon; sausage links; sausage patties; and ham. I was hoping we'd be there for Spam day, but they probably save that for Monday to start out the week with something special.
Since I'm an early riser, I left Sam sleeping in the room and took a Diet Dr. Pepper down to the lobby and enjoyed breakfast while I read my complimentary issue of USA Today. USA Today is an ingenious idea: it takes all the news that you normally read on the Internet, and actually prints it on paper that you can fold up and read at the table. At the proper time, I went back up to the room, slapped Sam awake, and led him down to the lobby to get his breakfast and regain his senses.
(By the way, for those of you wondering, Diet Dr. Pepper is not yet an official sponsor of cwthornton.com, but we're taking any offers. The same goes for Spam.)
We decided to leave our giant Warner Brothers bags in the room. They're impressive and hold a lot, but to get to the stuff at the bottom, you have to put on a miner's helmet and tie a rope to your waist. We opted instead for the smaller but more manageable Smallville bags we had scored the previous evening.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton