I wanted to leave the house between 2:30 and 3pm, just to be safe. Our flight was at 6:45pm, and I wanted to be there as early as pos­si­ble to avoid any prob­lems. Jake told me that it wasn't nec­es­sary, so we ended up leav­ing around 4 or so.

When we got onto I-25, the drive to DIA started out fine. Once we got to about 35 miles out­side of Den­ver, the traf­fic seemed to slow to a crawl, then just stopped altogether.

Jake was start­ing to get antsy, and I really couldn't blame him. I was con­vinced that it was just some­thing small, and that we would get going soon enough, so I wasn't ter­ri­bly wor­ried — at least until about a dozen state troop­ers on cycles were dis­pensed out to some­thing far out in front of us.

Twenty min­utes later, we were both start­ing to get pissed off. I kept look­ing at the clock on my phone and telling myself that we'd get mov­ing here in just a minute, just a minute. Mean­while, my brain was cal­cu­lat­ing poten­tial arrival times at the air­port if we were able to move in the next 5, 10, 15 min­utes. It was incred­i­bly nerve-wracking, but we finally got moving.

Once we arrived at the air­port, all of our fears were put to rest. There were absolutely no peo­ple wait­ing at the Fron­tier counter when we got there. We weren't check­ing any bag­gage, so we printed our board­ing passes and took off for the terminal.

A train ride and a short walk later found us at the gate where Kitty Kitty News Babe (known in another life as Kat Mor­rill, but for­ever to us as KKNB) was wait­ing for us. Kat had taken a con­nect­ing flight in from Phoenix to Den­ver to get to ATL. Upon hear­ing this, I had no choice but to book the same flight. (How could I resist pes­ter­ing KKNB for almost three hours where she would have no chance of escape? Ha!)

We arrived in Atlanta just shy of mid­night (EST) and found Amy wait­ing for us. Then began the 45-minute or so drive down to Loganville to see Hou­s­eXP, Brian and Suzan's newly-finished house (and our quar­ters for the night).

It started rain­ing decently hard after we arrived in Loganville. We still had to re-pack Amy's Jetta with the food sup­plies as well as lug­gage and PCs, so we did as much as we could in the rain and then moved the car into the the garage. Once all that was done, we broke out the alco­hol and pro­ceeded to catch up with peo­ple and talk con prepa­ra­tion. After some chat­ting, I needed sleep. So I found my way into the guest room, checked e-mail, pulled out the mat­tress and slipped into dark­ness for a few hours.

I really was quite excited to finally be at con. Amy had been work­ing very hard for sev­eral months on dragon*con TV, and to a much lesser extent, I had also been doing some small things for that as well as man­ag­ing web­stuffs for techops. I know that we were both just ready to go, and here we were, just hours away…

I quite enjoyed the sleep, prob­a­bly because I knew that that was going to be the most rest I'd get on the whole trip — so I needed to make it count. After all, the count­down to the mad­ness was now in sin­gle digits.