Weekend at the Con - The Bad

This weekend was a trip to Fields of Honor. We were running the Star Wars game from Little Wars. Here are the "Bads" of the weekend.

I had a little bad luck that started the night before we left. My Wife and I went to look at new cell phones but hadn't both made up our minds 100% on the models we liked the most so we decided to put it off. We were driving to get some food when the driver's side rear tire started making a weird noise. I had run over a huge stick and it punctured the tire. After changing into the donut tire it was getting late so we started driving to all the tire places we could find that could change the tire that night. Eventually we found a place and got it changed and got home in time for my wife to leave and make it to work on time.

The morning went off without a hitch and we made past Iowa city and about an hour out of Des Moines when we get the call that the store bus that our Star Wars game was on broke down. Actually their transmission lost overdrive so 3rd gear was the max gear they could use. So a back track to Iowa City to stop at a transmission place was needed. Knowing that we were running the game at 7 and time was running out, LoG (including myself as the groupie) decided that we needed to rent a U-Haul. The gaming store owner wanted to do the same to get his merchandise there to try and make a little money for the weekend so we decided to go into it together. However we got screwed because he wanted to split the cost, despite the fact that our stuff took up less than 20% of the truck.

OK so we now have half the U-Haul (in price at least) but we have a whole gaming store bus to unload and reload into the U-Haul. We did the human chain thing and manage to move everything to the new truck in under an hour. Next came the fitting a thrid person in the back of my car, which it really isn't designed for. But you do what must be done. And of course we had to help unload the U-Haul when we got there because we had to get their stuff out to get our stuff out.

Tied in with all of this is the end of the weekend drama. The reason we drove seperate was because for us four it was a vacation and a time to have fun. Two of the people that came with worked part time for the gaming store and they weren't there to work. One aspect of driving ourselves meant that we could leave when we were ready. Well the owner of the store had a group talk with his staff (not us) on Saturday night and came up with the plan that with our help, he could pack up all of his stuff into the U-Haul quicker, have one of us drive the U-Haul back to Madison and turn it in, plus drop someone back off at the bus, and probably unload the U-Haul as well. Add in that they would have left about 3 hours later than we were planning. Things got kinda tense after we told them that we weren't doing that which caused some more angst, but we all agreed it wasn't going to happen.

So other random bad things:

Hotel Bar closing early, poor bartenders, running out of stock, and over charging us for alcohol above their listed price.

We ate at various places during the weekend and had generally poor service.

Old Chicago had a horrible pizza buffet. I am a picky eater so leave me the pepperoni pizza and I am happy, but even everyone else eating with me was confused by the choices we had out there. There were combinations of stuff I had never even thought of and no one else in the restraurant was eating them either.

And the absolute worst was being in Iowa for a whole weekend!