DAY ZERO
WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2009
I drove the whole way down to San Diego. I’ve got no problem with my sons’ driving skills, and they’ve got a lot of problems with mine, so you’d think that I’d take advantage of the situation and be chauffeured for the 3 hour trip. But there are still safety issues involved. Certain family rules have developed over the years (like “don’t let your father interact with the drive-through intercom” and “the remote control is not community property”) and one of those is that whoever is driving gets to pick the music. So if one of my sons drives, there are better than even odds that eventually the music playing in the car will impel me to grab the wheel and force the car into something unyielding enough to disable the sound system. Fortunately, my taste in music doesn’t have the same effect on my sons… it simply induces a temporary catatonia that’s easily dispelled with a few robust slaps to the face.
Our first stop was at the hotel I had booked. Hotel rooms are a valuable commodity in San Diego during the Comic-Con, and the room rates increase substantially during the week of the Con. Cynics would say the price hikes are greedily opportunistic, but I’m inclined to think that the hotels experience a corresponding increase in overhead when they book Con attendees. Fan-types are notoriously frugal when it comes to lodging expenses, and they tend to defray the cost by sub-letting their hotel room to seven or eight fellow enthusiasts, so the rooms are subjected to a bit more wear and tear than average. Add to that the extra cleaning required to remove Cheeto residue and the added security it takes to break up the nightly fistfights between the Kirk vs. Picard crowd, and I imagine the increased room rate is justified, even if you take into account a smaller water bill due to the dip in shower usage.
Last year, I tried to book early, and I used the online hotel-booking service Priceline to find a room at an affordable rate. That strategy was, for the most part, a success… it got me a room at a Holiday Inn that was a reasonable distance from the Convention Center in the historic Bowery District of San Diego. I decided to use the same strategy this year.
As you probably know, with Priceline, you name a price, a minimum hotel rating, and a geographic area, and agree to accept whatever hotel Priceline comes up with at that price. This year, I entered the same parameters as last year, and was initially disappointed; the site quickly informed me that no rooms could be found at my price. But it suggested that I broaden the geographical area, so I included Coronado Island in my parameters and tried again. Surprisingly, I was booked at the four-star Loews Coronado Bay Resort, which, with its beach location, double-ply toilet tissue, and non-paper towels, looked like a marked improvement over the Holiday Inn. And it was still only about 20 minutes from the Convention Center.
When booking the room, Priceline makes it clear that you’re only guaranteed a queen or king-sized bed, and you’re on your own if you want two beds in the room. I called the hotel a couple of weeks before the trip and asked them if it was possible to request two beds instead of one, and, between fits of giggling, they told me that, as a Priceline customer, the rate I was paying didn’t buy me any extra favors, and that maybe, if there were two-bed rooms available at the time of check-in, and if I caught the fancy of the person checking me in, there might be something they could do. So, anticipating a one-bed room, we brought a pad and a cot for Sam and Ben to sleep on.
(This is probably a generational thing, so perhaps an explanation is in order for those of you reading this that are too old to realize that guys in their 20’s will hyperventilate at the thought of sharing a bed with each other or, even worse, with their father. I’m a guy who, when sleeping, moves around about as much as your average corpse… I don’t make snow-angels and I confine myself to a relatively small amount of the real estate offered by a king-size bed. One of my sons could have used the same bed and crossing paths with me would have been as likely as running into Bigfoot. Yet the prospect of one of them sharing the bed with me was treated as inconceivable; after bringing it up a couple of times, I was politely asked to quit making their blood run cold. Thus the pad and cot.)
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton