Thus far in my trip I have walked through Manhattan, stumbled through GenCon, made it past Vegas and am now relaxing in LA.



New York:



Friday - I arrived in New York a mere 5 hours or so after my scheduled arrival time. Whereupon we stumbled into our hotel, Paul who had already been into the US for a week and checked in, was currently out, so Andrew and I wandered out and up to the Rockerfeller centre and eventually wandered into a McDonalds as the only reliable food vendor that was open at about 1am. We spent a little time catching up with Paul who returned about half an hour after we got back to our hotel.



Saturday - We sorted out some basic issues such as phones and shampoo and then went down to Battery Park to look at the September 11th memorial and caught the Staton island ferry to get a reasonable look at the Statue of Liberty without having to expend an entire day. We then wandered up to J&R World which is a rather large electronics store where I marvelled at US game prices (I nabbed myself a copy of Jade Empire for $9.97) and we picked up a few other bits and pieces including a camera for myself (One of the Nikon Coolpix). We then headed up for a nice walk up through Chinatown to Little Italy where we caught the train back to the hotel.



Sunday - Had us hitting the Met and the New York Public Library, both amazing, some of you may have noticed the photodump on facebook of all the photos I took. I think we took at least 1200 photos between us there. Narmio arrived that night and we all headed to Time Square for a wander around and terrible pizza for dinner.



Monday - Here we started the day by heading the the Ghostbuster's fire startion on Franklin's street where we found a place with fairly good coffee nearby. We then headed down to Century 21 for a bit of shopping. I picked up a few things but Paul and Andrew basically spent the entire day there. Narmio and I went from there to Battery Park and Staton Island, and then went to J&R followed by the Met (which we found out was closed on Mondays) and the New York Public Library (which we arrived at just before closing time). We then met up with the others for dinner. Where we had absolutely awesome steak followed by (for the coffee drinkers) terrible coffee and rather crappy desserts. About here is where I started taking a certain peverse pleasure from prodding Paul (an avid coffee drinker) about coffee.



Tuesday - Narm and I headed off to the Met while the others headed to the Cloister to look at more medieval art. We spent the morning there and then headed back by way of the NY Public Library where I abandoned Narm to head to time square to find the queue for the cheap show tickets. (Narm did manage to get out okay and headed off to his next location without issue). We wandered through Time Square, I decided against getting a PS3 while exploring Toys R Us there, which was quite impressive and we got tickets to see Spamalot, which was great.



Wednesday - saw us getting up early and heading back to Century 21 to return some stuff, make a couple more purchases (I had discovered that the shoes I had brought were not great for walking in day after day.) and then get back to our hotel, packing, packing a suitcase to send back to Australia and get on our way to La Guardia airport for the plane trip to Indianapolis



Indianapolis:



Our luck with planes held, we were delayed 4 hours getting to GenCon, due to mechanical problems on the plane. The problems were enough that the plane assigned to our flight was replaced. The flight itself to Indianapolis was pretty quick, but instead of getting there at about 5:30pm, being able to explore and pick up our badges for GenCon, we arrived at 9:30, and so had enough time to grab dinner at the hotel and then call it a night.



Thursday - We got up bright and early and headed to GenCon (I had an RPG at 9am, picked up our badges and our program guides which were seriously magazine sized, I have sent one back so I'll have to show it to you guys at some stage. I played a game of Robotech Shadow Chronicles, which was reasonable, but I probably wouldn't choose to play it again. Grabbed lunch and then played a hack and slash game called the Pirates of Penzantium using the Wickedly Errant Game System (or WEGS for short) which was pretty fun and fairly fast and loose with plenty of use of poker chips. That said I pretty much fell into a single combat strategy because that by far the most effective way for me to hit and do lots of damage. I then headed back to my hotel room and refreshed my podcast list. In doing so and listening to the really short ones that had come out, I became aware of a Fear the Boot meet up on Thursday at 7pm. I looked at my clock 6:50pm and rushed out of there to get to that meet up.



The meet up was a lot of fun there was much talking playing a little bit of werewolf and providing everyone who went into the bar who was not familiar with Fear the Boot, with Fear the Boot business cards. A few people bought drinks for everyone so I also sampled a few different cheap american beers. I still have not found any beer that tastes good.



I will do the rest of the days as one group. Basically I spent most of my time wandering through the dealers hall during the day when I was not attending other events. On Friday I attended a Dumpshock meet and Shadowrun TCG game which was fun and I ended up getting 2 decks so I can play it at home. I also attended a recording of This Just In at GenCon which was also pretty nifty.



Saturday had me attending the Catalyst Games seminar, the Shadowrun Seminar, a live Fear the Boot recording (you can in fact hear me if you listen to episode 112), a live Pulp Gamer Out of Character recording (you can hear me if you listen to episode 56) followed by the Podcasting meet and greet where I got to meet and talk to people from a variety of podcasts, some of whom I listen to, some of whom I don't, at least not yet. It was a lot of fun and quite interesting to put some faces to voices, though rather strange as people never look how they sound, and I can never describe how I expect someone to look based upon their voice anyway.



Sunday was fairly quiet, I tried Alkemy (a miniatures based skirmish game put out by Kraken Editions which was quite fun) and went to the podcasting media wrap up, where I arrived late and so just sat at the table as Chad & Dan from Fear the Boot, Don Dehm from Pulp Gamer and Itamar from Hamishakia talking about the media track and improvements for next year. I then helped Paul with carrying his purchases as part of the reason for him being there was to expand his distribution business. Looks like he is going to be doing stuff with Wyrd Miniatures as well as Alkemy.



Monday was even quieter with us heading out for breakfast, packing, packing a box to send back to Australia, shipping that off and then getting ourselves to the airport to get to Vegas.



Stay tuned for the next post covering Las Vegas and LA

Tags: card games, gencon, indianapolis, new york, rpgs, usa
Current Location: Seattle, WAAAGH!