Vegas for Trekkies - a look back at 2003

Well, we're getting ready to go to Las Vegas again at the end of the month. We'll visit the Star Trek con at the Las Vegas Hilton again as well and I am remembering that I never did finish my little travelogue about our visit last year...I got about half way thru writing about the trip when life interrupted me and I never finished...here's what I captured in the moment. I'm gonna try to do a bit of writing about this years trip each day of the trip...well, we'll see :)

Warning -- this is a really long story. I'm thinking about chopping it up and re-posting it on a more day by day basis. For now it's the whole kit-n-kaboodle and it does go on and on. If anyone needs an editor it's me!

My Vegas Vacation – Prologue

About 5, maybe 6 years ago I was reading a Star Trek novel. I love Science Fiction and have been a Trek fan since I was 8 or 9 years old. In addition to the novelizations of the series episodes and of the movies there are authors with stories enough about all of the Trek series characters adventures to add up to hundreds of paperbacks and dozens of hardbacks. Then there are the kiss and tell books, sour grapes books, self promotions, biographies and autobiographies (yes, I have them too, got George Takai, “Sulu’s” autographed at Waldenbooks in Bakersfield). Some of the original series stars have written fiction, Jimmy (Scotty) Doohan and William (James T. Kirk) Shatner who ‘authored’ the Tek Wars series, which weren’t half bad so I suspect really good ghost writers. Anyway, I have most of them and keep buying the new ones when they come out…except for the ones about the Voyager series…never got attached to that crew. I suspect now we have reached the point where you’re being given way too much info and wonder where this is headed…so…

That novel…I finished it and in the back there are usually advertisements about the next books due out and when they’ll hit the bookstores so I read those pages. On one back page was an interesting bit of information. There was a “Star Trek Experience” adventure ride and theme area at the Las Vegas Hilton, cool!! I had never been to Vegas so I mentioned in passing to Glenn that if we ever wanted to go to Vegas that would be the reason why and where I wanted to go. Finally, four years ago, we made our first trip and it’s become our summer vacation tradition ever since.

This year we planned our trip to coincide with the Star Trek Convention which had been there the past 3 years but to which we had never gone. In early June I ordered our convention passes and a special event tickets to a Saturday night “happy hour” as well as booked the airfare on United. More about all that later…I was pretty happy that we were going to the convention, over 4000 fans were registered at the time (the number was up to 8000 when I checked the site just before we left) and a good turn out of Trek stars were going to be making appearances.

Mid-July arrives and the con tickets still haven’t shown up. I call the convention office. They said that they had just mailed the tickets. Sure enough they arrived one week before our planned departure date of July 31.

Oh, about that departure. I had gone online and booked tickets on United for 8:45PM thinking Glenn and I would work Thursday and only have to take Friday and Monday off. A day later I found a “companion fare” coupon in my daytimer that I had received from United when they sent me my Premier card, which I had received because of hitting a certain mileage point total from last year’s EMEA and APac trips. Premier status is kind of cool, you still fly coach but get special perks from United anyway (this is crucial info by the way, not more senile wandering away from the point, as it pertains to certain events later in the trip). I called the United Premier operator wondering if there was anything I could do to save $240 by using the coupon for the flight I had booked. Nope, can’t use the coupon for an online ticket anyway and I would have had to cancel the tickets, pay a cancellation fee and re-book. It would have cost at least as much as I had already spent. The final blow was that the coupon expired on July 31, so I could have only used it for this trip. *sigh* Well, I told myself that if that was the worst oversight I made on this trip I guessed that wouldn’t be too bad. Everything else seemed to be working out fine. I should have knocked on wood right then.

I printed out my United e-ticket receipt and itinerary and tucked it into my daytimer, not really looking at the details as I had jotted it all down when I made the reservations. A day or so later, about the same time the convention tickets arrived, I was putting things together and took a look at the itinerary. The 8:45 on Thursday July 31 was AM not PM, so much for working on Thursday. No way I was going to pay to change the ticket now, the price was much higher as well as the penalty fee. A meeting had fallen off my calendar so I could take the day off easily. I called Glenn with the bad news. His boss was considerate too and didn’t mind the extra day. Again, I tell myself reassuringly, if this was the worst additional incident things weren’t all that bad. The rest of the days leading up to the trip are uneventful and I leave work Wednesday night feeling pretty good about having everything under control. I really should have knocked on wood and maybe rubbed my lucky Irish wishing stone (yes I have one, it’s in my office, you can examine it anytime. It doesn’t seem to work on lotto numbers).

Thursday, July 31 – Two Trekkies Head Off to Vegas!

Note: this is a really long section about just getting to Vegas. Feel free to skip ahead to the part about the Star Trek Convention...I'll give it a separate header.

We get up at 5:00 AM to make sure we have plenty of time to make our 8:45 AM (yes, it’s ok if you roll your eyes at the dingbat here, Glenn sure did) flight out of SFO with plenty of time to spare to stop off at the United Red Carpet Club, which Glenn had never seen, and grab something to eat. Since we’d packed almost everything the night before we were mostly ready to go. I check my bags…did I pack cigarettes, underwear, toothbrush, blow dryer, and 4 big plastic bottles of Arizona Diet Green Tea? Yep, all done, let’s go!

The night before I had made sure that the airline e-receipt print out, convention itinerary and tickets to the convention were all together stored in a nice bright blue 8.5” x 11” poly folder with sturdy elastic on the corners to keep the papers inside safe, so I wouldn’t have trouble finding them. I double checked that all of the emergency info was laid out on the countertop along with instructions for the kids. Roy Klipple had agreed again to be the temporary guardian which meant I could leave town feeling ok that in an emergency the kids would be able to get medical care. Last time Roy went to my son’s place of business, LaserQuest in Mountain View, to give him a ride home and told his co-workers that he was Matt’s babysitter. That went over real well. This year the kids are very self-sufficient and Roy only has to respond if there’s an emergency, I hope it didn’t disappoint him that he didn’t have more to do.

Showered, dressed, and ready to go, I went and said my goodbye’s to my two comatose teenagers who normally sleep till noon this summer. (I think they realized I was leaving, I was sure by Saturday they would have it all figured out) We packed up the Subaru wagon and headed to SFO. Traffic was light; we got to the long term parking lot in good time and took our bags over to shuttle stop 10. When the shuttle arrived we grabbed our luggage and hopped aboard. The shuttle took off like an Indy car leaving the pit just as I got through the door, I hadn’t even had a chance to stow my bags, I nearly tumbled to the back of the bus. Hastily, I threw my stuff on top of the rest of the pile in front of me and staggered off to sit by Glenn (I figured out just before the exit gate what the hurry was, the driver abandoned the shuttle and a new driver took over…talk about minding the clock)

At the next swiftly negotiated curve my carry-on bag fell off its precarious perch in the luggage bin and I hopped up to right it, hoping my laptop was ok and glad I had found the unbreakable plastic bottles of Diet Arizona Green Tea since the glass bottles would certainly have broken. I was still fuming about the way the driver had nearly closed the door on my foot and lurched off before I could get organized and in a seat. I guess if people tipped them they’d be nicer, like the shuttle driver who got me from Heathrow in London to my hotel, but that apparently isn’t permissible for the long term lot drivers. As I noted above, just before we left the lot a new driver took over who didn’t drive like Mario Andretti which was fine with me and allowed my blood pressure to normalize.

We arrived at the United terminal stop unscathed and were able to unload our stuff rather leisurely thanks to the new driver. We headed into the terminal past a long line of people standing around outside. It looked like they were getting boarding passes and checking luggage outside on the curb. I thought that had stopped due to security issues, but if that’s what they were doing I still wanted to check the baggage thru inside…I had a “plan”. My United Premier card allowed us to use the same line for our ticketing as the first class travelers, by-passing the considerably longer line at the “regular” ticket counter. I loved walking past the rabble and joining the privileged set. (See, I told you the whole Premier card thing was integral to the greater story)

It was as we approached the ticket window, that I realized I didn’t have the nice bright blue 8.5” x 11” poly folder with sturdy elastic on the corners to keep the papers inside safe, with me. Of course the e-receipt for this flight was in it. I started hyperventilating. I was headed off into the panic zone, not because of the missing airline itinerary which wasn’t like losing a paper ticket…it was the other stuff in the folder, but more about that later, let’s get on with this part.

So, I was standing there three feet in front of the ticket agent babbling at Glenn semi-hysterically about the nice bright blue 8.5” x 11” poly folder with sturdy elastic on the corners to keep the papers inside safe and he was calmly trying to make some sense of it all. He kept making these soothing sounds and rational comments like, did you leave it on the bus, are you sure it’s not in one of your bags. Normally I wouldn’t respond well to someone trying to be reasonable while I’m having a crisis…but I managed to calm down just enough to tell Glenn that I could still get our tickets and boarding passes so let’s do that before I totally devolve into a blithering idiot. He must have realized the best recourse for self preservation was to just quietly let me do whatever I needed to, so he did.

I told the agent I had purchased two e-tickets and she asked for my photo ID. Of course it wasn’t simply a matter of typing in my name and voila there’s the ticket. My hyphenated last name caused the same problem it usually does. The DMV computers can’t handle the hyphens and apostrophes, so on my license it looks like OBryan is my middle name. Using my driver’s license as a guide the agent was looking for a ticket issued to Schad, Dawn not O’Bryan-Schad, Dawn. I was on the verge of causing the kind of commotion that gets the security folks nervously flocking around when I thrust my United Premier card at the agent (“Calm down” Glenn says as I do this). She finds our information almost immediately and we got our tickets before I started foaming at the mouth.

I would like to digress here and explain the main reason for my pre-hysteria. It wasn’t simply due to the loss of my nice bright blue 8.5” x 11” poly folder with sturdy elastic on the corners to keep the papers inside safe …as I said earlier it did have the convention tickets in it and some printouts with the hotel confirmation, etc. but all of that was replaceable or ultimately unnecessary. The real reason for the panic was that there was a lot of personal information printed on the stuff in my nice bright blue 8.5” x 11” poly folder with sturdy elastic on the corners to keep the papers inside safe …someone could determine where I lived and would be able to guess how long I was going to be away. I was imagining that some miscreant might take advantage of the information to try and burglarize us…of course my nearly 18 year old paramilitary son Matt could probably make short work of them with his Airsoft pellet gun arsenal, but that too was an alternative I shuddered to imagine. “Mrs. Schad, this is the Mountain View Police. Someone broke into your apartment and your son unloaded 1000 rounds of Styrofoam pellets at him. Your son’s ok, the would-be burglar is quite bruised and embarrassed but will survive…”

I somehow managed to communicate this concern to Glenn who calmly suggested we go back to shuttle to stop 10 or at least wait for the bus we had been on to come back around and ask if the driver or a passenger had found the nice bright blue 8.5” x 11” poly folder with sturdy elastic on the corners to keep the papers inside safe …we went outside and waited for a couple of busses to go by, but I just couldn’t handle the idea that by doing all this we’d be late for, and maybe even miss, the plane. I had even more anxiety about that so I decided to think positive thoughts about all the nice traveling folks who turn things in to lost ‘n’ founds and don’t even look inside nice bright blue 8.5” x 11” poly folders with sturdy elastic on the corners to keep the papers inside safe and misuse the personal data. *sigh*

We still had plenty of time before boarding and I wanted that opportunity to hit the Red Carpet Club, a place in which I might possibly calm down enough to seem normal to the security personnel looking for foaming maniacs to haul off and strip search for terrorist paraphernalia. Glenn and I headed back inside and over to the security-check line. The line that morning for most passengers heading into the terminal was quite long but one of the other Premier perks at the United terminal was that we got to go thru a “priority” security screening and were through that in a couple of minutes, shoe and laptop removals and inspections included. If they’re going to wipe my shoes and laptop with something they could maybe dry the stuff off a bit better…ick. And airport floors are cold on bare feet. I had thought that if I wore open sandals they wouldn’t ask me to take off my shoes. Wrong again. It’s not the type of shoe they’re looking at it’s the height of the heel. My shoes were fairly flat but the heel wedges up to about an inch high at the back and that was thick enough for them to worry about something.

Also, as if being barefoot wasn’t annoying, the IBM ThinkPad is a very popular laptop. There were 4 ThinkPads being inspected at the same time, I kid you not. Mine has a “leased” sticker on it but is otherwise unremarkable. I almost walked away with someone else’s. I will be sure to customize mine before I travel with it again. Maybe a neon “Anarchy!” sticker…hmmm, maybe not, those security screeners don’t seem to have much of a sense of humor…well there was one in Vegas…but I’m ahead of myself so you’ll have to read all the way to the last day to find out about that guy.

Finally, off we head to the gate and I’ve got my eye open for the Club, I see signs with arrows overhead and bear in the direction they’re pointing which is the same direction as our gate, conveniently. Glenn needs a pit stop about halfway to our gate, we haven’t seen the entrance to the club yet so he uses the terminal restroom just to the right of the food court as we approach from the front of the terminal. Glenn comes back out and we continue down the moving walkways in the direction of our gate. I still have seen no sign of the Club. We get down to our gate which happens to be all the way down at the very end of the terminal, about 40 minutes before boarding should start.

I ask a nice gentleman in a United Airlines sweater standing near the gate if he knows where the Club is. He says go down to the food court and its there on the right. So we head back the way we’ve just come. I look on the right, there’s the Swatch store that grabbed my attention when we passed it and right across from that is the bathroom Glenn stopped at. I’m still looking…I figure the nice gentleman didn’t know what the hell he was talking about and was just about to have my current snit turn into a real hissy fit when I see the Club. It’s to the left (maybe the nice gentleman either didn’t know right from left or was giving directions for someone who resides in a mirror universe) and right next to the bathroom Glenn used…I was standing in front of it waiting for him earlier and didn’t even see it. *sigh*

Let me take a moment here to say that although it must have been excruciating for Glenn to be patient with me, he was extremely patient and good humored with me even though I was not in good form at all. We got in the Club, it was quite nice, a bit busy, but we had some goodies, watched the morning news and then headed back down to our gate just in time to hear them start announcing the boarding procedures.

My Premier status had gotten us upgraded to seats in the Economy Plus section at the front of coach, and although I was tempted to get First Class tickets I just couldn’t bear using all those mileage points on an upgrade for such a short trip with no meal service. I was saving the miles for a longer trip…later I’ll tell you why it might have been a good idea to have used them, but I didn’t know better at the time. We had a tad more leg room and were called up to board first, right after First Class. Well, I was anyway…I had 11e(middle), he had 11f (window) but I got “boarding 1” and he got “boarding 2” if I had taken my assigned seat he would have had to climb over…why they did it that way I don’t know.

The flight left on time and we enjoyed a smooth clear-skies flight down the coast for a bit then headed east towards the Sierra Nevadas. About an hour into the flight the captain tells us that there is a big thunderstorm system over Vegas and we are diverting to come in from the south instead of the north to land in front of the storm instead of flying through it. Ok, fine by me, I’m sure flying thru a big thunderstorm would not be fun. Soon the Captain is directing us to look down at Palmdale and then Edwards AFB, but it can only be seen from the side of the plane opposite me…which is too bad as I was raised at Edwards and can’t remember ever flying over it. Just outside of Vegas the ride gets bumpy. Although the storm is on the other side coming at us we still hit some turbulence, but not enough to ruin the flight.

Finally in Vegas! I overhear that there’s a place right inside the airport where you can check into your hotel, get your room key and just go straight up to your room instead of standing in the hotel check in line…cool, Glenn goes off to get the bags while I get in a short line. The gal at the counter was great, I asked for a room with a view of the Strip and she found us one on the 16th floor. I got the keys and she asked if I’d like to take the hotel shuttle. I thought the $11 rate was good and she could sell a round trip voucher so all I had to do was call the shuttle company to arrange a pick-up at check-out. I finish up and see that Glenn’s waiting with the bags, we’re ready to go. Meanwhile the guy who was behind me in line is with the counterperson to my right trying to check his group into 6 rooms. The counter person wants all the other folk’s photo ID’s and apparently they just left him to handle the check in while they wandered off. I wonder how that went…

We went out to the line for the shuttle to the Hilton. It was very, very long line and only the first half was under the shade. Up comes a shuttle next to us…it’s for another company. We’re standing in the spot for his passengers. The driver is confused…who are you people and why are you in my line? He goes up and has a heated discussion with the fellow who is with the shuttle company running our shuttle. We are all asked to crowd up into a mob closer to the shade but still not under it. A bus from our company pulls in. There are maybe 80 people and 60 of them are ahead of Glenn and me. The shuttle looks like it can hold 30. “How long till the next bus?” I hear. About 20 minutes. We had already been baking in line for about 20 minutes so we decide to just go back thru the airport and grab a cab. In hindsight maybe we should have stayed in the shuttle line.

Have you ever been to Disneyland or some other amusement park’s favorite ride on the busiest day of the year? Imagine all those people with luggage, its 99 degrees even though there was shade over us. That was the cab queue. You had to walk thru a line that bent four times on itself in one area then you got shunted over to a new area that is a mirror image of what you’ve just been through before you get to the taxi loading zone. That’s how you cram a thousand people into an area ten feet wide by maybe 100 feet long. Well it seemed like thousand. Maybe only a couple hundred.

Finally we hit the home stretch and get into a cab. I have this habit of reading everything within eyesight. Elevator licenses, the nutrition guide on cereal boxes, whatever. So I take a look at the cab license displayed on the front dash, it says that our driver is Getachew Tamrat. I swear I didn’t make it up and I took a minute to write down the name in my little notebook so I could mention it in my travelogue. Later when we take a cab to the strip our driver is another Tamrat whose first name I couldn’t make out, but who knows, maybe Vegas has a whole clan of Tamrat cabbies.

We head straight up to the room bypassing a huge check in line. It’s Thursday at about 11:00 am but there’s a Star Trek convention starting tomorrow and last I’d looked there were about 8000 registered attendees so I would imagine the check in staff was going to be very busy for the next couple of days. I didn’t see any obvious signs of Trekness in the line…nobody was in costume or carrying a phaser, didn’t see any celebrities either but it was early for them to be showing up.

We get to the room and it’s nice, good view, not close to the elevator or ice machine and has internet access (Glenn is pleased). I think the room used to have I mini-bar because I open a mini-bar fridge sized door on the side of the “entertainment unit” and it’s empty. I call down to the desk and order a mini-fridge to store my…let’s say it together: Arizona Diet Green Tea! I plan to ration my 4 bottles very carefully over the next 4 days as each bottle holds about half of what I usually consume in a day. Actually, I figured I’d be drinking a lot of strawberry daiquiris so why bring along a lot of extra tea. Glenn asks why am I ordering the fridge, I hadn’t mentioned the tea to him earlier. Again with the eye-rolling, I hope he doesn’t get his contacts wedged up inside his eyelids.

While we wait for the fridge to show up we unpack and arrange our stuff around the room. It’s about noon and we’ve had nothing substantial to eat since about 7:30 unless you count the weird snack mix on the plane. I had just picked out the mini pretzels and given the rest to Glenn so I was very hungry. I figured the fridge would show up eventually and we headed down to lunch. Destination: Quark’s Bar and Restaurant.

In case you’ve not been initiated into the mysteries of Trek-dom, Quark was a character in the 1993 to 1999 TV series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He was a Ferengi. If you go to this link you can see a picture of me with a Ferengi. At any rate the Ferengi are the great capitalists of Star Trek and in Deep Space Nine Quark owned a bar on the space station after which the show is named. Deep Space Nine is inhabited by permanent and transitory residents, so there’s lots of fodder for episode plot lines. A lot of the show’s action took place on the station’s Promenade which is where the bar and other shops are located. Some critics like to think of it as Star Trek: The Mall. In the Hilton Quark’s here on Earth, the dishes are named after Star Trek characters and a lot of the drinks are in oddly shaped glasses, come in weird colors, multi-layered and have dry ice to make them smoke and look all alien—the Core Breach especially. We peruse the menu; it hasn’t changed that I can tell—apparently there’s no such thing as culinary progress in the future. I order the Steak Picard and a shuttle salad, Glenn gets a Hamborger. I won’t bore you non-Trek types with a treatise on who Picard and the Borg are…just look them up at http://startrek.com/startrek/view/index.html if you’re interested. The food is pretty good; we finish and wander around the shops. The little shops beside Quark’s bar in Vegas are on their version of the Promenade and sell Trek merchandise. You can get a teddy bear dressed as a star fleet officer, a Klingon, a Vulcan, even a Borg. Just about every conceivable type of knickknack is available with a Starfleet theme. You can also have your face scanned into a cast photo of your favorite Trek series personalities…I’m pretty fond of Star Trek but I’m not that fond, so don’t look for a picture of me standing with Captain Kirk propped up against my Star Trek Barbie and Ken (In the original display box that looks like the bridge of the Enterprise). We are just there to check things out so no purchases today.

We now come to the inevitable “what’s next?” portion of any vacation. We hadn’t really planned to be in Vegas all day Thursday and didn’t really know quite what to do. We head up to the room to ponder it over, look at the city guide or something. Once in the room we can see a lot of very dark clouds. The thunderstorm our pilot had traveled out of the way to avoid was over the city. The lightning show kept our attention for a while and also helped us decide that maybe today wasn’t going to be a great day for wandering down the strip. We ended up taking a nap.

Couple of hours later we are awakened by much noise in the hallway and banging around in the rooms to either side. When we go out a little later we discover that at least one and maybe more youth basketball teams have checked in and are on our floor. Literally on the floor too, they are lounging about everywhere, eating junk food and leaving the litter in the hallway. They were up late nights and noisy too, lots of door slamming, loud talking and basketball bouncing in the rooms and hallway. We took our revenge, though, by getting up earlier then they did and making sure to make lots of noise in the morning.

So it’s Thursday night, around 9PM…do we want dinner? We go downstairs and look around. Lunch was pretty filling and we don’t want a full restaurant dinner. After hitting the hotel gift shop for some small items we go back to the room, order room service and watch TV for a bit then go to sleep. Ah, the night life in Vegas for us!!

Friday August 1st – Going to the Star Trek Convention

The original plans were to arrive in Vegas late Thurs night, so I had bought tickets for all day Saturday admission thinking we’d do the Strip on Friday. Well with the change of plans and the ugly weather we decide to go get registered and buy a day pass.

We go to the “will call” line since I had ordered my tickets in advance. I prepare myself for problems because they had mailed my tickets and I had lost them. Of course I’m not going to tell them the whole story about the nice bright blue 8.5” x 11” poly folder with sturdy elastic on the corners to keep the papers inside safe that I left at shuttle stop 10…I just say the tickets didn’t arrive on time. They give me tickets for Saturday and my preferred seat passes. What about the Happy Hour tickets? I’m on the list, just show my photo ID when I get there and they’ll let me in. Seems reasonable. Can we buy tickets for today? Do I want preferred seating again? That’s $55 per person, general admission is $35. I think to myself, lets go with the preferred. They’ll take cash or check only. I have about $40 in cash. Glenn has the same. I look for my checkbook. No checks in it…just the check copy pages…it’s off to the ATM for cash. We come back and buy our tickets and get a convention schedule.

There are a few worthwhile celebs to go see today – Marina Sirtis, aka, Counselor Troi, who tells great stories about her days on Next Generation…she does a great bit about how her character’s IQ drops in synch with her costume’s necklines and when she stops showing cleavage the scripts have her being all brainy and doing command stuff…she delivers it well and it’s a hoot.

Then there’s the “holographic doctor” (yep, that’s his name…they never get around to actually inventing a real name for the character. The actor is Robert Picardo) from Voyager who is quite funny and then is joined by two others from the Voyager crew in a panel called “The Boys of Voyager” some of that was funny, but I don’t enjoy it immensely since I’m not a big Voyager (Star Trek: Lost in Space) fan. We plan to come back later to see Leonard Nimoy “Mr. Spock” from the original series who is the keynote speaker for Friday.

The thing we most wanted to do that day, however, was see Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher, from Star Trek: the Next Generation) as he was going to read from his new book. I wanted to make sure that we get into the convention exhibit hall early, buy an “autograph ticket” so we could help support Wil’s trip by having him sign his book, which we are also planning to buy directly from him at his table in the exhibit hall and again, I wanted to get there early to buy the book before he sells out.

In order to get to the autograph tables we discover that one must pass thru the merchandising area. This is inexplicably more like a “buy my overpriced toy collectables, cards, and misc. other remotely SF stuff” eBay auction brought to life than what I had anticipated the exhibit hall to be.

I will digress a bit to explain that Glenn and I had been to a Star Trek convention when we lived in Bakersfield, the kids were probably 6 and 8 maybe a bit older, and we dragged them along too. It was a 2 day con, there were lots of celebs (Matt asked a question of Nana Visitor (Major Kira Nerys in Deep Space Nine) during her Q&A, he was so cute) and the exhibit hall at the Bakersfield Con was full of pretty good stuff, lots of unique merchandise and mostly Star Trek related with a little other sci fi and fantasy stuff thrown in. This was what I had hoped to find at the BIG Las Vegas convention and I was disappointed in the lack of cool stuff to buy. Oh well. Glenn did find a Hallmark Enterprise – D ornament…lighted and everything.I was looking for a “Starfleet Academy” window sticker…no luck, guess I’ll stick with “Borg Institute of Technology”.

Anyway, did I tell you why we wanted to see Wil Wheaton of Wesley Crusher fame? (scrolling back to see what I’ve said so far…nope, I haven’t explained) He left the series about half way through, didn’t have more than a brief cameo in one of the later feature movies and was probably cast for the teen demographic…neither of us was a huge Wesley fan back when the show came out nor in re-runs. However, Glenn had discovered Wil Wheaton’s web site months ago and it had a very “geeky” audience as Wheaton’s interests include lots of techie stuff I don’t understand but that Glenn is way, way into. Glenn sent me a link a couple of months ago to something interesting Wil had said on the site (where he also keeps a running diary on line that is called a web log or “blog”). As I sometimes think that someday I might do something with my writing besides boring friends, family, and colleagues with these travelogues, I was interested in this blog stuff as well as his journey to becoming a published writer. Wil has some clever, witty stuff to say about being Wesley Crusher on his site, wilwheaton.net which “those in the know” call WWdN (this I found out from “them in the know” as I am not one of ‘em). Having been thus lured to his site and hooked, I became a bit of a Wil Wheaton fan myself.

Anyway, we continued to the back of the exhibit hall and found the autograph sections…yes, there were two different sections. One was roped off with those velvet theater lobby ropes and had an entrance table where you bought a ticket…not sure for what or how much one paid, but as we looked around the area and saw no Wil Wheaton inside why buy a ticket? What we did see inside this area were secondary Star Trek characters/guest stars and, inexplicably, Peter Mayhew, the actor who played Chewbacca in the Star Wars movies. Some people get Star Wars and Star Trek confused I guess, but you’d think a guy who was in the movie would know the difference. Maybe all the hair in his eyes in that Wookie costume is to blame. One thing we notice as we walk past is this guy is *really* tall…even seated he is eye to eye with some of the visitors who are standing in front of him.

On the outside of the ropes and a bit further back in the hall are more tables and more characters. Some had fairly significant recurring roles in various Star Trek series, others were occasional characters. A couple had been multiple aliens on multiple Star Trek series shows…the thing about all that alien makeup is that you can be a lot of different aliens and one would hardly ever realize that just last week you were a Klingon and this week you’re a Romulan or lord knows what. There were also actors from other TV Science Fiction shows; I guess they hope that Star Trek fans are fans of their shows too. Re-runs equal residuals. As to why these other folks weren’t stashed behind the ropes I never found out. No sign of Wheaton back here either but there are lots of empty places behind the tables…maybe later he’ll show up. We want to find him before his reading at 3:00.

To kill time we wander around the casino a bit then come back to the convention rooms/exhibit hall. We had gotten our hands stamped to prove we were paying customers but nobody checked when we came back…I guess I could have saved some money, especially since our “preferred seating” for an extra $20 were seats near the back of the room and in the center of a very long row…we found better seats in the non-reserved section for just about every speaker.

We head back to the autograph “holding pens” and there’s Mr. Wil sitting at a table in the “not roped off” area, whoo hoo, no admission fee, I’ve got the autograph ticket, there are books on his table, we’re set! We stand there next in line (there’s someone chatting with Wil as we walk up…I guess you could call that a line) and wait for our turn. You can’t help but listen as they chat and Wheaton is very friendly, engaging…seems genuine and enthusiastic. You get the same feeling about him from his web site posts…I try not to be too cynical and say “it’s Friday, the first day of this con, he’s just gotten here…wait till tomorrow or Sunday, he’ll get surly” I do always want to believe the best of people. Ah, it’s our turn. Glenn is quiet…he is behind me. Hmmm. I guess I have to talk to Wheaton.

“Hi, I was hoping you’d have your book available and would autograph it, I’m a new reader to your website and am looking forward to reading your book” or something along those lines. He smiles and says how happy he is that I read the site, want the book. I say that I bought an autograph ticket and he says that I can use that for getting something else signed but the book is a separate purchase which he is happy to autograph without the ticket I bought, I assure him that I was all for buying the book…he hands back the ticket and says the book is $20 so I haul out a twenty and he asks my name.

I ask him to please sign it for both Glenn (two “n’s” please) and Dawn…he does. I tell him that Glenn is the guy who got me interested in the site and finally Glenn gets to talk to Wil. They talk a bit about the site, what Glenn’s interested in, that Glenn has posted in the “Soapbox” area of the site which is a place for exchanging views and offering advice…I didn’t know Glenn had done that and while the guys talked “techie” I spoke to Wil’s wife saying that it seemed like the guys were speaking a foreign language and I empathized with her for sitting there listening to it all…I mentioned that I worked for a high tech company and was HR support for technical types that I tried hard to keep up with and that caught Wheaton’s ear... “Who do you work for?” he asks, “oh,” I say “a little company you might have heard of, Cisco Systems?” He actually seems impressed and I like that…he’s been in a hit movie (Stand By Me) was a TV personality and is a published author and he’s impressed that I work in HR for Cisco. Cool.

Well we’ve gotten our autographed book and there are a couple of folks in line now behind us so we thank Wil who again tells us how happy he is we like his site and how he hopes we’ll like his book and we head off. It’s going to be a while before he does his reading so we wander about, I find the bathroom, have a smoke. What am I going to do with this autograph ticket? I really don’t want an autographed picture…I decide that later on I’ll get him to sign a copy of the convention program. Hope he doesn’t think that I’m a stalker…but I want him to get his share of the money I paid for the ticket and I was willing to bet that if he didn’t give these tickets to someone from the convention organization they weren’t going to give him his share of the proceeds, so I was going to have to go back to see him anyway.

Glenn and I wander a bit and as it’s getting close to 3:00 we wander over to the hall set up for Wil’s reading. We grab good seats up front and wait. I skim the first chapter of his book. The room starts to fill up, good turn out.

Wil comes in. Applause is strong, the crowd is on his side. He chats for a bit to warm up the audience and shares a bit of insider view into Trekdom…just what one comes to a convention for! Then he reads from his book. Good reading, I’m very glad I came.

We have some time to kill before we go see Leonard Nimoy who is the keynote speaker for today. More wandering around ensues, then we just decide to go back to the room and rest a bit.

Nimoy comes on stage at 6 pm after a musical video montage of Spock scenes. The room is packed; he’s a very pleasant man and a big fan favorite to judge by the turnout and applause. He says it’s nice to be in Vegas, asks how many are local and generally warms up the crowd. One of the first things he says on stage is that he’s heard there’s a number of women at this convention that are claiming to have slept with “Captain Kirk” He spends quite a few minutes trying to get someone to “fess up” and the give and take between him and the audience is quite silly but fun.

Now during the course of the day I’ve seen some gals in t-shirts that said “I slept with Captain Kirk”. Apparently they’ve all boldly gone where other women have gone before. Kind of a “been there, done that and got the t-shirt” thing I guess. The gals were not all bad to look at based on the two or three I noticed. As I ponder this I decide that maybe 20 years ago I *might* have thought it was funny to wear one of those shirts but two things come to mind about someone going around advertising today that they’ve been one of Kirk’s babes…first, if we’re talking about having had the honor recently one notes that Mr. Shatner is getting really long in the tooth and wide in the waistline...gee what a catch.

If we’re talking about having had the honor back in Bill’s heyday then we’re just advertising our own advanced age, again, would you be anxious to do that? I’ve seen some of the gals who played the Captain’s love interests in the original series; they sometimes do panel discussions at the conventions. As a matter of fact, “Yeoman Rand” is at this one signing autographs behind the velvet ropes. So let’s just say, to be kind, that the bloom is off the rose and I don’t want to be mistaken for her contemporary. So, either way I don’t really get why anyone would want to advertise they’ve got bagging rights on ol’ Shatner’s bod. As Spock would say “it’s not logical.”

Back to what Spock is saying, he answers a lot of fan questions, I didn’t hear anything that was shocking or exciting...but there was one gal who prefaced her comments with “as a fellow Vulcan” and another one who had on a pair of glasses from New Year’s Eve…the glittery “2003” shaped ones where the “00” are the lenses…she wore these all over the convention each day, even managed to get interviewed for the local news (which I happened to catch and see her doing the interview). Nimoy commented on the glasses. He tried to be nice but he did get some laughter at her expense.

The preceding was all I wrote. I still want to talk about our Saturday night "Cocktail Hour at Quark's Bar with Rene Auberjonois (Odo) and Armin Shimmerman (Quark)" experience at the con. I've gone back to the Soapbox on WWdN to see what Glenn wrote to jog my memory (per Glenn's suggestion). I'm going to do some excerpts of his posts as well as my own recollection.

--- time gap while I read the post history ---

Glenn’s posts on the Soap Box last year are pretty good and save me from frying my poor little brain cells trying to remember details about last year. He’s given me permission to post here.

Glenn got a question from another Soapbox participant re previous post: “Ha, I would have like to have seen this. Was he (Armin Shimmerman) "non-responsive" stoned or "giggly" stoned? Did he have anyone else on stage with him? And did you get to go on the Star Trek ride?”

Sort of a mix of both. He was very much aware of his condition, and poked fun at himself. No one joined him onstage. He was relatively early the second day and came straight from his flight (my gf was next to him for a bit in the checkin line about 30 minutes earlier). His wife (tall woman!) was kind enough to bring him some food to thin out the drugs in his system.

I did go on the ride. I'd been on it before, so no surprises there. It felt a bit rougher this time, but that could be because I'm getting older. It's been 2 years since I last rode.

I coughed up the $15 (twice, the gf wanted one too) for the "picture on the bridge". I'll scan it & put up a link some time. The picture is fairly nice. I wish I'd worn pants instead of shorts, though... my boney shins just don't look right in the captain's chair. They let you wander around the bridge for about 5 minutes afterwards & look at stuff. That's kind of neat as well.

He doesn't mention the Hawaiian shirts which also look incongruous. I like my picture with me in the captain's chair and Glenn as "Number One" seated to my right.