Woke Up This Mornin’, Got Myself a Room – Got Gen Con In My Eyes . . .

The trip has started to take on a life of its own.

I guess I didn’t realize how much untapped potential energy Gen Con had built up inside of us ‘lo these many years – if I’d know how eager we were to actually do this thing, I’d have tried to start the avalanche sooner. As it stands now, things are screaming down the mountainside quite smoothly. Keep those fingers crossed.

Mostly, what’s been going on these last few days is a sort of ‘journey of discovery’ concerning what Gen Con is actually about. All we really knew beforehand was that Gen Con had to do with gaming, and the idea was always there that it was sort of a gaming geek’s (read: our) Mecca, but beyond that, we had nothing but unconfirmed stories and rumors to go on. I mean, from that angle of ‘a place where we belong and hope to visit one day,’ a person might as well ponder the question of what they’ll find beyond the Pearly Gates, you know? “Will there be people we know there? Will Ed Greenwood be there? Will we be able to talk to anyone we want? What will we do with all that time?”

We’ve found some interesting answers to these questions, but I’ll leave those for Charlie to discuss and dissect in the next entry. BTW, Charles, I find I’m quite positive about this sort of pass-the-torch-back-and-forth subject format for the blog – seems like it’ll be lots of fun. Hopefully, Constant Readers, the next entry won’t be Charlie telling me to knock it the hell off. Anyway, on to my Motel 6 story!

It’s important for all of you to understand what our money mindset is as it concerns this trip before I go any further. Charlie and I aren’t approaching Gen Con like a couple of cheapskates – there are definitely things that each of us are willing to shuck out the bucks for (see Charlie’s first entry). However, we are neither of us independently wealthy, and so we are trying to exercise a bit of financial restraint in the areas where it seems most prudent. Like hotel rooms.

Gen Con has a huge block of hotel rooms around the convention center that they reserve each year to help their attendees find lodging. Now, these rooms were priced in such a way that, while not being completely out of the question, they would have left us with little money for things like books, dice, and foam swords – the staples of Gen Con, as we’re told. Still grappling with the concept of how large this damn thing was actually going to be, we started kicking around the idea of making our own reservations. After all, we’re big boys, we can use the phone and call around for rates – why get stuck into a room twice as expensive as it needs to be just because we were lazy about the whole thing? For our friends who know us, please refrain from comments pointing out how going ahead and just paying more so we wouldn’t have to call around is actually more in character for us, OK?

Here enters our tale the most powerful force known to modern man – Google. After we had brought up a detailed satellite map of the entire city of Indianapolis (the ease of doing so was a little frightening to me, when I think about it), we started cross-checking hotels with public transportation routes that terminated around the Indianapolis Convention Center. This was necessary, of course, because we had eschewed staying in the expensive rooms near the actual event site (I’ll bet Charlie will cover this part in his post – probably under some title like, ‘What We Learned About Why Staying Close to The Convention Center Might Have Been Cool).

Thankfully, Google performed with its usual effectiveness, and soon we had a couple Motel 6s to choose from. Motel 6 is a place where, according to their commercials, there is always sufficient illumination which they guarantee will be provided specifically for us. Even more attractive to us than this phosphorescent promise was the price – it seemed that Motel 6 was willing to let us stay for three nights in a room containing both a Queen-sized and King-sized bed for about $100 less than the Convention Center was going to charge us for the same basic deal. We were intrigued.

And here it is, our first lesson for the prospective Gen Con traveler: don’t bother calling the Motel 6 near the Indianapolis Airport for a reservation, ever. This was the first site that we looked at. The picture is to the right.

Doesn’t look too bad. I mean, it isn’t fancy, but there aren’t drug dealers hanging around outside it, you know? That’s always a plus. Maybe, we thought, just maybe we’d found a clean and cheap alternative for lodging. Then I called the front desk. That was a mistake. “Hello” is what I think he said, although spelled out, the word would have looked more like ‘Gullowe.’ Not only was this man incapable of communicating in a manner so that a fellow English speaker could understand (and please, don’t read that as some racist comment, either - this dude was full-blooded American…unfortunately for us, I guess), but he also seemed unaware that he was working the front desk of a major motel chain.

I asked him about public transportation, and he didn’t know what I was talking about. “The buses!” I said. “Do you know if there are any buses that leave from around there?!” “I’m thinkin’ so” was his response. When asked (with no real hope of a useful answer) if any of those buses might swing past the Convention Center, he said, “I think you’ll have to transfer…somewhere.” I didn’t even bother asking about their rates. And that was the end of my conversation with the front desk staff at the Indianapolis Airport Motel 6.

Dejected, I moved down the list, afraid now that Motel 6 was showing its true colors, and that all my digging would be fruitless. Then, I saw these pictures:
Hmm. Hopefully, you are comparing these two pictures with the first one and are noticing subtle differences. Wary, I called the front desk. “Greetings and welcome to Motel 6, my name is Sherry, how may I help you?” Ok. This was going well. Sherry continued to bat 1.000 when she was able to tell me the buses stopped about a block away, and that it would be no problem to get to the Convention Center. Almost too good to be true, really. Which usually means something is about to go wrong – and my only remaining question was the big one.

“So,” I said, “how much would three nights in August – the 13th, 14th, and 15th – cost us?” I braced myself, got ready, had my finger on my phone’s disconnect button. “Well,” she said, “You really ought to go online and reserve these rooms, you’ll get a much better rate – I think something around $40 a night.” Which totaled out to about $140, split two ways, for the entire hotel stay of four days and three nights.

We’re staying at Sherry’s Motel 6.

Gen Con Event We Have to Participate in of the Day: Boffing