Thurs­day after­noon, 2:30pm.

I arrive in Atlanta, and for some rea­son, as I was stand­ing at the bag­gage claim wait­ing for my very descript 'black lug­gage,' I began to won­der why I checked that par­tic­u­lar bag in the first place. It would have eas­ily fit into the over­head bin, and I only had one other bag with me. For some­one with some­where to GO and a cer­tain TIME to be THERE, this was more than a com­plete waste of time for yours truly. But, the time had passed when I would have been able to rec­tify this, so I stood there and waited for my suit­case. When in doubt, just look for the one with the Tro­maDance sticker.

With the bag firmly in hand behind me while simul­ta­ne­ously adver­tis­ing Tro­maDance, I headed out to nav­i­gate my way to the MARTA sta­tion inside Harts­field Inter­na­tional, while also attempt­ing to call Amy and let her know that I'd safely landed. Plus, it was a good excuse to test out my cell­phone and find out if it even worked in ATL. It did.

One impor­tant thing to note here is that damn near every street in Atlanta has the word 'peachtree' some­where in it. I say this because once the MARTA train dropped me off at the Peachtree Cen­ter (which housed the two respec­tive hotels that were home to dragon*con), I was forced to fol­low a string of con­fus­ing signs that looked like they were crafted for some impend­ing new civ­i­liza­tion wait­ing to take over the uni­verse that will speak only 'peach.' A bit need­less to say at this point, but the signs were none too help­ful. On top of this, the bus stop appeared to be in some sort of under­ground labyrinth, filled with esca­la­tors, esca­la­tors, and um.… oh yeah, more escalators!

With the large black signs silently mock­ing me, I fig­ured I should just head up until I couldn't go up any­more. Even­tu­ally, I would find the rest of my species and life would be good again. I like my species, and these cave-dwellers were not ter­ri­bly accomodating.

Finally!

After what seemed like dozens of esca­la­tor rides, I reached a clear­ing where a some­what famil­iar sun greeted me with a warm glow. I remem­ber you! Then I looked at the sign directly above me which read, 'Peachtree Street North.' Bugger.

Then I noticed what I con­sid­ered a rather strange occurence, but is appar­ently com­mon for those that live in the south. I watched a bead of sweat drop from my head, stop mid-air, par­tially evap­o­rate, and then come back up and hit me in the eye. What the hell?

Oh well, stranger in a strange land. You must reach your des­ti­na­tion, which in this case was the Hyatt Regency Atlanta.

Game plan was to go to the Hyatt, meet and greet Amy and oth­ers, get my offi­cial dragon*con cre­den­tials, and head across the street to the Atlanta Mar­riott Mar­quis to meet up with Todd Doogan, an ATL local who was being quite gra­cious in help­ing us set up the Troma con­ven­tion booth due to my late­ness in arriv­ing in ATL.