Trip to Atlanta GA for Dragoncon

For those of you who don't know, Dragoncon is arguably one of the largest sci-fi/anime/video game/nerd conventions in the entire US.  Originally it'd started out as a fantasy/sci-fi convention, but as time progressed and few trends came and old ones faded, things changed and now it's certainly just a mess of everything crammed into one huge convention.  The entire convention takes up five, FIVE hotels in Atlanta, the Meriot, Hyatt, Sheraton and just starting this year the Weston hotel.  All five hotels many with over 50 floors full of rooms are sold out every year.


Now, having said that this year I managed to snag a room at the Sheraton, the smallest hotel I believe with only 12 floors.  Which is actually a good thing.  Less crowded means less noise, and time spent in an elevator.  Last year staying in the Meriot hotel with over 50 floors of rooms, a simple elevator ride to the 28th floor took almost 30 minutes just to reach my floor with people getting on, off or simply stopping the elevator just to see if they could fit inside with us.

Not fun at all, I don't ever want to go through that trouble again.

I took plenty of pictures, over 300 to be exact this year, which is still nothing compared to 2009 Dragoncon where I had taken almost 700 pictures over the five days I was there.  As always there's a lot of fun to be had in downtown atlanta.  Amazing restaurants and people to meet, not to mention other convention guests are usually fun to meet and make friends with as everyone seems to share at least one common interest.

Though sadly there was a few bad happenings.  Our hotel room charged us an additional 200$ for coffee stains on two of our towels, along with claimed we 'stole' some when we left them at the pool and hadn't even noticed until the the next morning when the pool area was already cleaned.  Honestly, 200$ for four towels?

And one restaurant was a terrible experience, Metrocafe in downtown atlanta just a ways down from the Hyatt hotel.  I understand places get busy during a convention, I know, I can easily see that.  but from the time we sat down, fifteen minutes for our waiter to even introduce himself and take our drink order.  Then we order our food, including appetizer and 2 bowls of soup.  A following 35 minutes go by and still nothing at all.  At that point I simply was furious and got up and left to find someplace else, I wound up biting the bullet and finding a cheap chinese food place and simply got something cheap as I was starving and it was beginning to effect my mood.

Onto sunday night/Monday morning.  I was at a party and got locked out of my hotel room.  Funny thing even getting locked out of your room at 4:15 in the morning things are STILL going on. The rave at dragoncon didn't end until close to 6 O'clock I'd heard.  Amazing people will party that much during that weekend.

Expect my next post to be more of a traveling/prep list for all my fellow convention goers.