For now I’m skipping Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which I will write more about later. Short version reads, “The con was cool, we read a lot and watched TV,” but this doesn’t quite do justice to the full version. Sorry about this skipping around a bit, but I will try to come back to the missing days later.
We packed our bags in the morning, including the extra bag we bought at Fry’s near our hotel, and packed the art items in padded envelopes and cardboard with tape. We considered packing the glass thing, but thought it would be safer to carry it with us, and the matted print was too big to go in the suitcase. But the suitcase held the jewelry box and the wood block for the glass thing rather well. During this time I also called voicemail at work and changed my message, and forwarded my cell phone business line back to my desk for that true “on vacation” feeling (though the personal line still works – as always LJ friends can still reach me by alpha pager here.)
We had breakfast in the restaurant again, and took the shuttle over to the airport. We again checked in and made it through security in record time, so we again waited nearly two hours in the gate area reading Terry Prachett.
On landing in SFO, Michelle stayed at the carousel to claim our bags, and I went up the stairs to see about a van ride. When I got back down, I could not find Michelle, so I walked back up to see if we had crossed each other on the elevators. I then went around the baggage carousel, walked up and down the concourse on both lower level and upper level, went back to the van ride area, then gave up and had her paged. When she didn’t show up for 5 or so minutes I went back down and found her, standing by the baggage carousel near where I had left her… apparently she had been sitting in the baggage claim area waiting for me when she heard the page, but had to call the paging guy to repeat the information. So we finally left the airport about 45 minutes late.
The ride home was very long… there were three people getting dropped off in Palo Alto on our way down to Santa Clara. Leaving Palo Alto we ended up on 101, then 85 and missed 280, looped back and caught 280, then got home. The result was a 2 hr 20 minute ride which probably would have taken 50 minutes if we drove ourselves. (Mental note, the van that you catch at the airport without making any prior arrangements seems to be more crowded and more expensive, probably because there is much less selection in vendors. The van from home to the airport on Thursday was $31 for 2 people and was just us, and the van from airport to home was $46 for two and we were 2 of 6 people going 5 places. Next time we will call ahead for the ride home too.)
By some miracle, my phone still held a charge after all this, thanks to judicious use over the weekend, and was just starting to beep-beep its complaint on the van ride home. We ordered out for Chinese from Cuisineer and watched TV. I wrote a bunch of backlog entries and I’m expecting to go to bed soon.