PAX Prime 2011: Day 0

PAX Prime 2011: Day 0

It’s that time of year again. Well, it was!

Derek and I don’t take vacations much because we’re homebodies by nature. But twice a year, we book a catsitter, get plane/bus tickets and reserve a room at a fancy hotel so that we can walk around in a crowded convention center and stand in line for panels or to play video games all day for a three-day event called PAX Prime/PAX East. And we consider PAX our ultimate vacation.

For this PAX Prime, I decided to make as many as plushes as I could to bring. Starting several weeks prior to PAX, I sewed and sewed. I spent almost all day every day sewing. I thought I had enough time to finish everything but as usual, I thought wrong.

I stayed up all night the night before we left for PAX. Before that I had only 2 hours of sleep in 2 days. I still couldn’t finish some stuff, so I had to pack my sewing kit in my suitcase. I was paranoid that the airline losing my suitcase, so I filled two carry-on suitcases with plushes, and put all our clothes in the suitcase with my sewing kit to be checked-in.

We left home at 5:30 AM, got to the airport, checked in, and headed to the gate. I had a bagel at Smash Burger, which was tiny and burned to a crisp. But I wasn’t going to let anything spoil my pre-PAX excitement.

After boarding, I pretty much fell asleep right away. I woke up after an hour or so and realized that the plane hadn’t moved… The reason was unclear, some said something about the weather, some said the runway was crowded and we were waiting our turn. We were allowed to get off the plane, and we waited by the gate. With Hurrican Irene approaching, I was praying that the flight wouldn’t get canceled.

Fortunately about two hours after the initial flight schedule, we got back on the plane and departed. Hooray!
Did you know that Continental Airlines DO NOT give you any snacks on a 6 hour flight from NY to Seattle? No pretzels, no chips, NOTHING, just beverages. Because we didn’t. We usually pack a lot of snacks, but this time we decided to travel light. It turned out that they only have meals which you have to pay for. Oh and the TV is also not free. Instead they have a DirecTV preview before takeoff and soon after it expires. So we chose to STARVE ourselves rather than paying for their already crappy service. Thank you Continental Airlines, you made me realize how I should have NEVER cheated on JetBlue. JetBlue, I love your free blue chips, free TV, and free sleeping kit for red-eye flights.

Anyway, we got to Seattle around 2 in the afternoon, and checked in at Sheraton. This year, the hotel key was Mass Effect 3 themed. (Last year was Dragon Age 2, the year before that was Dragon Age)

Thanks again to Continental Airlines, we missed the lunch hour for most restaurants. We were lucky that Lecosho was serving lunch, exceeded our expectations and filled our stomachs. Great service, super friendly waiter and delicious food! Their happy hour menu was very reasonably priced and great for sharing.

We also ordered entrees. My salmon was absolutely delicious! And so were Derek’s pork chops. I’m not good at describing delicious food so there are photos!

Suffering from food comas, we crawled around the area trying to pick up some magic potions (a.k.a. hard liquor) but we failed. We were tired, so we gave up and picked up a bottle of wine and went back to the hotel.

I started sewing almost immediately after we got back to the room. Sewing “10s” onto the Hot Dog Fairies (see stuffed stuff: Hot Dog Fairies) and touched up other plushes. Then via Twitter, I found out that neither Tim Schafer nor Tasha Harris was going to be attending PAX Prime. Bummer! Because I made Costume Quest plushes for them, hoping that I could give it to them in person. They were excited to see a photo of them in progress though. I told them that I’d mail them to them later.

I think I went to bed around 4:00 AM. Yup, I was about to start my first day of the three days of PAX with 3 hours of sleep…

Derek took a lot of photos with his fancy camera during PAX Prime, so some photos belong to him.
Check out Derek’s PAX Prime 2011 set and My PAX Prime 2011 set for all PAX photos I used for my post!

Tagged as: pax, penny arcade