Tomorrow we head to Salvo, NC for vacation. If you don’t know where that is, it’s part of the Outer Banks, about 40 miles south of Kitty Hawk. Our plan is easy: relax. Hopefully we’ll be successful.
I’m bringing some new photo toys along to play with. Hopefully that will be successful, too.
I have that most precious of commodities: A spare Dragon Con hotel room in one of the main con hotels. Two actually! We got five rooms last year (because we expected to use them, we’re not hoarding) but turns out we only needed three.
I was tempted, briefly, to put one of these rooms up for auction at my recent professional conference Scholarship Charity Auction. However, I wasn’t convinced that my fellow roadway professionals would understand the value of what I was offering. After all, it’s not the hotel room, per se; it’s the effort and stress it takes to acquire said hotel room.
Right now there are five main Dragon Con hotels. The Hyatt Regency, the Marriott Marquis, the Hilton, the Sheraton, and the Westin. Every single one of the rooms available to Dragon Con attendees sells out within minutes of them going up for reservation. Last year, I put together a team of six people in geographically diverse locations to help me get rooms. Their instructions were to just GO GO GO and make reservations until I told them to stop. Six people, hitting the website of the Marriott reservations system furiously, only managed to acquire five rooms. That should illustrate for you just how difficult this process is.
That is the value of a spare Dragon Con hotel room.
There’s no need to ping me if you want one; they’re probably already gone. I’m getting rid of them as I type this. There is no shortage of takers when an announcement is made that a hotel room has come available. There are groups dedicated entirely to the finding and trading of Dragon Con rooms. It’s never a problem to find people.
Twenty-two days until the Con!
Griffin became a one-year-old yesterday. He seemed to have a good time based upon the amount of unconsciousness he exhibited last night.
For 364 days now, I’ve been responding to the question, “How old is he?” with the answer, “Zero!”
Alas, tomorrow that will no longer be the case. Griffin will celebrate the anniversary of his worldly emergence. It’s been a year and a wonderful (and tiring) one at that. Here’s to many more!