I was just gong to put this as a comment on the other thread, but I felt that the tone and topic is different enough. This post is actually about my trip to Atlanta, the other one was just waxing nostalgic about my past.
I left last Thursday after work. After stopping at home for an hour to shower, change and load up the car, I took the seven hour drive to Atlanta, stopping only a few times for gas and what-not. I arrived a little after midnight, and Jason and I stayed up a bit talking about a few things. He gave me my birthday present, a beautiful piece of original artwork, a robot-dinosaur painting.
I don't remember the specific timeline of everything that happened, since I barely looked at a clock while I was there, and day often blurred into night during a boardgaming session. We played Descent for hours one day. Jason had bought a copy of the base game, but had only played it once so far, so he enjoyed the chance to play as the adventurers and pick my brain on the rules.
We also played
Galaxy Trucker, and I had serious beginner's luck. I always finished building my ship last, but had less vulnerable spots and always won the "prettiest ship" award at the end of the rounds. Jason had suggested we play a practice round, and I couldn't agree more on how good an idea that was. Your first time flying your ship really shows you the glaring flaws in novice ship designs.
We also got to play Guillotine, Small World and Snow Tails. Jason's girlfriend, Allen joined us for these and they both really enjoyed them and did really well at them too. Our round of Guillotine ended with Allen winning by 2 points ahead of Jason and I who tied.
Allen also won one of the 2 games of Small World using the very powerful Warlord Tritons combo at the start of the game, going into decline on the second turn then finishing out the rest of the game with Seafaring Elves, never scoring below 10 points per round until near the end of the game, but by then it was too late for us to catch up.
For movies we went to see
Moon which was playing in limited release that weekend and opens to more theaters this weekend. I had never heard of it, and Jason and I have a long-standing tradition of trying to see movies without knowing too much about them. Not having any pre-concieved notions just makes them better in my opinion.
I was also forced to watch the "Red Dwarf" special "Back to Earth" that I had been avoiding because I had heard it was terrible. Red Dwarf was one of those things I had discovered back in high school. At the time, it was a brilliant, British comedy sci-fi series, but over the years it has decayed into a self-gratifying, self-referential show with recycled plots and stale jokes. Jason insisted I watch the special so that I "could begin the grieving process".
To cleanse the pallet afterwards, he showed me another British comedy called "The IT Crowd". It took a few episodes to grow on me, but that's usually the way it is with British shows for me. Once I got into it, however, I was hooked. We watched the whole first season in one sitting, and I've watched the second season this week on Netflix.
For food during my visit, we had ribs, of course. Mmmm... delicious. We cooked hot dogs and roasted s'mores. One evening we had steaks and roasted corn-on-the-cob. Did I mention that Jason loves to grill.
When it was all over, I had another 7 hour trip home. I got back at 11pm Sunday evening. The weekend was wonderful, but definately too short. I'll be going back up for DragonCon again at the beginning of September, and Jason also offered to fly me up one weekend to help work
one of his art shows before the end of the year.
