Conventional Wisdom - On Road Trips (Patreon)

So, I’ve been trying to come up with a list of blog topics in hope that I can get these things out on a more regular basis. (I mean, you good people ARE paying money to get them, after all) Unfortunately, I keep falling into the rut of “My Top __ Best/Worst Something” lists, like an otaku version of Cracked *shudder* Well, I try my best to run with those ideas without letting the results get too clickbaity.

Anyway, let’s talk convention trips. Not the conventions themselves, but just the trips there and back. We’ve all got stories of That One Trip where everything just went wrong. I still remember my early days on con-going, sitting spellbound by my friend’s tale of being stuck in traffic for hours behind a pig truck. While I’ve yet to experience any con trips plagued by livestock myself, I’ve still had my fair share of road trips gone wrong. Being waylaid for hours because the car’s axle was busted immediately comes to mind. Also, driving to Baltimore (and back) in the middle of summer in a car with no air conditioning, that was a special experience. Or getting lost, I can tell you the number of times somebody’s directions have been off, resulting in hours spend on the wrong road, or in the wrong parking lot, or just going in circles in a crowded urban center, trying to find the right hotel. I’ve stayed up way too late before leaving, or just left way too early (once we hit the road at 2am, that was a bad choice). And of course, there’s the ever-present joy that is traffic jams, which I guarantee you’ve experience during at LEAST one con trip.

But the top (or bottom) of my personal Crappy Con Trip list has to be the single time I went to Anime Boston. Now, I had a lot of fun at AB itself, but the trip? Okay, first things first: I took a bus. That’s your fist lesson to take away from this blog post, right there. NEVER TAKE THE BUS TO A CON. That’s part of the reason I quit living in DC, I kept having to travel to and from cons via mass transit. That’s just a bad way to do things if you’ve got a mess of cosplay or Artist Alley merchandise to take with you (just ask Servo how taking the bus to Intervention went). But that’s neither here nor there, you want to know about how this SPECIFIC trip went. Well, the ride out was punishing, but doable. A bus ride from Washington DC to Boston is a good eleven hours (if I remember correctly) but I’d made that same trip from DURHAM to Boston before, so I survived. No, the kick in the pants was the ride BACK. For one thing, my ride back didn’t leave until midnight. Yes, after a full weekend of conventioning, I had to sit around in a Boston bust station for a good six hours with nothing to do but try and stay away (it’s not like I could afford to do anything else). But that wasn’t even the bad part. No, the bad part was when frickin’ Megabus finally showed up… and couldn’t leave for, like three or four hours. The bus wouldn’t start. For HOURS. After a full weekend of exhausting anime con, with half a day’s worth or travel ahead of us, in the middle of the night, and the freaking bus wouldn’t start. Sitting in this cramped double-decker Megabus, incapable of being comfortable or going to sleep, wondering if we’d actually manage to move before dawn, that’s when you start reevaluating your life choices.

But what about GOOD con trips? It’s funny, but those seem to be a lot harder to come up with. I was talking it over with one of my friends (he of the Pig Story), who suggested that a “good, memorable convention trip” might be a contradiction in terms. For most people, the best con trips are the ones where nothing happens period. I can see where he’s coming from. When you’ve been up for days trying to get your con stuff together, or are just trying to get back to your own bed once it’s over, I guess you don’t really want to get up to roadtrip shenanigans, fun or otherwise. But honestly? I still enjoy a good roadtrip, even when there is a convention at one end. One con or another, back before Conventional Wisdom had actually started (hence my fuzzy memory), I ended up on a two-person drive up to DC. There was some kind of traffic disaster that we’d heard about in advance, so it avoid it, we ended up driving most of the way up Virginia’s backroad and state highways rather than the Interstate. Now, anyone’s who’s ever traveled to a DV/Maryland con from the South knows that driving through Virginia is one of the most boring things a human being can ever do. But THAT drive? That was one of the best con drives I’ve ever been on. I have a real soft spot for tourist traps and roadside dives and general white trashery (from a car window, anyway), so this was substantially more fun than just two hours of trees and exit signs.

But I think my most favorite has to be the most recent trip I took down to Atlanta for AWA. This was the longest solo trip I’ve ever made for a con, which is a really sociopathic way to start this off, isn’t it? No, I don’t mean that I was blissfully spared the hell that is interaction with other human beings (I have earbuds for that, silly). What I mean is, without anyone else’s schedule depending on my arriving on time, I was free to indulge that love of tourist traps to the fullest. If you read the AWA comics, you already know how I drove over an hour out of my way to visit South of the Border. Instead of rehashing that, let me tell you about this gas station I stopped at somewhere east of Atlanta. I have no idea what town this was, because I too busy avoiding the stalled, abandoned car on the exit ramp to pay attention to the sign. That’s too bad, because I’d make a pilgrimage out there every trip if I remembered where it was. This was one of those gas stations that wasn’t part of any chain, just a corner store with a few pumps out front. And at least three different people were at those pumps ON FOOT, filling up jugs with gas. Maybe ONE of those people can be explained by the abandoned car, but the rest of the crowd? Oh, and make no mistake, there was a crowd. An amazing half of them didn’t even look like they were crackheads! This was clearly one of those instances where the gas station was literally the only place to go in town, this was a cultural hub. The door to the place was covered in posters for some regional wresting promotion, or concerts flyers in Spanish. And the inside, oh, the inside. This was one of the most cramped gas stations I’ve ever seen. Every inch of floor was taken up by a maze of shelves and displays and heat lamp island things that some grocery store probably threw out. They had EVERYTHING at this place: mozzarella sticks, chicken wings, homemade pork rinds, fifty kinds of jerky, all the major food groups. And that was just the main building, there was this side wing that looked like it used to be a restaurant before being used for storage. But for all I know, they could have only opened at night and you just moved the boxes if you wanted to sit at that table. It wouldn’t have been any less cluttered than the rest of the gas station. Oh and the bathroom. That bathroom… was actually pristine. No really, the cleanest spot in the place, and one of the nicer gas station bathrooms I’ve ever seen (way nicer than the one at our local Sheetz). But the weird thing was, it wasn’t a gas station bathroom, it was a house bathroom. I mean, it was furnished just like the bathroom in a person’s house, with floral print wallpaper and a towel in a hanger by the sing and one of those picture frame border things around the mirror. Somehow, that was actually WEIRDER than the expected toilet held together with tape & a sign warning you not to sit. Truly, this was the stuff of road trip legends, and I am genuinely glad my travels allowed me to experience it.

Now where was I? …crap, how am I supposed to get back to anime conventions after all THAT? Meh, let’s just go with a cliffhanger. Now that we’ve talked about the trip, next time we’ll talk about the HOTELS!

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