It was early in the year when I learned that Ms Leick was going to appear at Gen Con. Now, we've made a couple of half-hearted attempts to organize a group trip to Gen Con, but it always seemed as if Dave and Eric were way too lackadaisical about arranging it. So I decided that I was going to Gen Con this year and that I'd try to get everyone organized early. A few weeks of constantly saying "we're all going to Gen Con **this** year" and "this is **the** year for Gen Con" and at least people were starting to get the picture that I was serious.

Realistically I only expected maybe three people to go with me. Certainly my brother Chris, probably Dave, and maybe one other person. I was surprised that Donald was thinking about it, although it turned out that one of his brothers was getting married that weekend, strange that. Woo also surprised me when he finally, after a couple of months, expressed that he was going, although later he had to cancel the road trip part since he couldn't get all that time off. Eric had to get there before the Con since he had to supervise setting up his booth, so he was out. Shannon was going with his company and also had to be there early. Pick never said anything, which we all assume means no. A third surprise was Van Horn wanting to go on the road trip, though he never told me specifically and it was rather amorphous for weeks after I found out.

Somewhere along the line Troy, Dave's nephew, was invited. I'm sure I told Dave that he could invite other people, since I didn't think I'd get any takers from my group, but I don't remember telling him that, so it was a surprise when Dave mentioned that Troy was going. When Dave first told me I got the impression that Troy was probably going to Gen Con with some friends but if that didn't pan out he'd need a ride up, and definitely need a ride back in either case. Apparently Troy had miscommunicated with Dave and what he had meant was that he and maybe some friends needed a ride up to Gen Con and back. This was a source of confusion for a few weeks.

Really, it didn't have to be confusing for such a long time, but for some reason people refused to acknowledge my emails. A good month and a half to go and I was emailing updates, giving tentative plans based on available information, and giving my assumptions too. And yet even when I was wrong nobody told me until the second or third time that I repeated myself, much to my chagrin. Especially bad with Van Horn and Troy since I don't see them. At least Dave wasn't sure because of his job.

Which brings up another point. Even if we drove all the time, which we ended up doing, it was going to take us at least 36 hours to get to Milwaukee from the Bay Area, considering we had to go by way of Oklahoma City to pick up Troy (and I wonder if Dave realized just how out of the way we were going in order to pick up his nephew; I'm talking about it ending up adding something like 1500 miles to the trip). Dave really couldn't get the time off and yet he wanted to drive up, meaning that we'd get to Gen Con late no matter what. And for some reason he thought it started Thursday night rather than Thursday morning, even after I said Thursday morning in a previous email. Sigh, does nobody ever read up on schedules and such?

A final complication was that Troy **had** to be back by 09:00 Monday morning to take some sort of test that he was making up (the test being on the Friday before). Now, we're talking about a 12 hour trip assuming light or no traffic which meant up to 15 hours since we'd be driving through Oklahoma City during rush hour. (And contrary to Dave's optimistic fantasies, you cannot average 80 MPH over a 12 hour period). This meant leaving by 18:00 so we could drive all night, meaning that someone had to get enough sleep, meaning I had to get enough sleep. No way I'm going to make people stop partying, so it was up to me. Dave had some silly notion of busing them home, once again not checking the bus schedules or he'd have nixed the idea once he saw that it was a 24 hour bus ride. The moral of the story is that it's damn hard to organize something when you have to keep a lot of people happy.