Checking In

I'm back from DragonCon. I had a fabulous time!! We had to cut our time in Atlanta shorter than we had planned. Casey got sick on Saturday, so we skipped out on all of the Sunday stuff. He's got it pretty bad. He's so puny, in fact, that he's got a dr.'s appointment scheduled for tomorrow morning. I hate it so bad for him. Yesterday was his birthday, and he felt horrible.

I have a huge pile of stuff to get done, and since I forgot the camera cord today, I'll give the short version of the weekend. Friday morning we got up and moving early. It seemed no matter how much progress that we made, the later our departure time got. We finally ended up leaving around 3:00 p.m. Casey was already feeling a little under the weather, when we left. We got there and met Kim and her finace, Joey, at the hotel. All of us piled in the car and made our way to downtown. We went through registration and picked up our badges. They were tough on checking badges going in and out of the hotels this year. We had an 11:00 p.m. meeting with the 501st Legion, Southern Outpost. I got to introduce Kim and Joey to all of our trooping friends. Afterwards, we just kind of hung out with everyone and filtered through the three hotels.

On Saturday, we were up early. I had my Imperial Officer costume completed and was ready to march in the DragonCon Parade. Casey's Snowtrooper was finished, but he felt so lousy that he chose not to march. Everyone marching had to be at the staging area at 8:30 a.m. The parade stepped off at 10:00 a.m. Here is a quick clip of the parade that CNN captured. Click HERE. The officers were all behind the Stormtroopers and Clonetroopers. It was a LOT of fun. After the parade on Saturday, I got to meet Anthony Daniels, C3PO, and Ray Park, Darth Maul. While in line to meet Anthony Daniels, we met a really nice fan named J.J. Turns out J.J. is a professional photographer. He introduced himself, when Casey mentioned that he hoped our battery lasted just a few more minutes. He was really nice and offered to take our picture with a nice professional camera. The picture turned out fantastic!! I hope to post it here soon. Anthony Daniels is really a super person. He told us the most interesting story about the picture we had signed. Ray Park is a super guy as well. He was very friendly and warm. We talked a little bit about martial arts, and he was very encouraging. I'll post the pics soon!! We finished up with panels and dealer's rooms on Saturday. Casey just got sicker and sicker through the day, so we headed back to the room around 7:30 p.m. By Sunday morning he was done for, so we just came on back home. All in all, we had a fun but short weekend.