It's been almost a week since our exhausted return from the
Nerdvana that is GenCon. It was a long, strange trip this year from the Monday
prior right through to Sunday evening.
For those that don't know, on the Monday before GenCon,
riding my bicycle home from my son's football practice, I slammed on my brakes
to avoid a situation. My front brakes worked wonderfully. Unfortunately, my
rear brakes failed completely. This sent me over the handle bars and on to the
pavement. For my troubles, I ended up in the emergency room with a mild
concussion and a jacked up right hand, wrist, and shoulder.
I was lucky in that I did not break anything - just a lot of
soft tissue damage and pain. Unfortunately, there was no way I could drive from
our abode in the far northwest suburbs of Chicago to the Indianapolis. Heck, I didn't even know how I was going to
get all of our stuff in the van now that I was in a sling. But I have an
awesome wife who, despite hating driving in that kind of traffic, took on the
pilot role. I'm not sure who was more
anxious...
But with the kids'
help and my wife's will, we made it down to Indy...only to be standing on the
street with nowhere to sleep. I'm not getting into details, but I am fortunate
to be able to stay in a condo just up the street from the convention. Problem
was, the keys to that lair were in a closed UPS store just of Monument Circle. Apparently
the delay in our departure (due in no small part to the slow packing because of
my injury) and the one hour time difference placed us outside the UPS store 55
minutes after it closed.
Now, we were fortunate in that we had a spare key for the
condo itself. Problem was we could not get into the building. The security
system into which one can punch a code and gain access was in the process of
being repaired; a fact we found out later. all we faced is a sign that read
something like "Temporary - Access only through garage 8/13-8/14" Now
the only way in was using a special key fob and going through the parking
garage...a key fob we did not have because it was on the key chain sitting in
the UPS store.
After waiting around a while (with part of the contents of
our vehicle on the curb) to see if someone would come out or go in (thus
opening the door to the building) a worker from the restaurant in the adjoining building - which uses the
same lobby/basement - took pity on us and used his access to allow us to gain
entry. Finally we were in! We then had to play a kind of relay game to unload
the vehicle - with me playing the part of door stop, for which I'm eminently
qualified...and not just because my injury limited my carrying capacity.
We had expected to arrive at about 2:00 PM, relax for a
while, eat some dinner, then go to a party that is a Wednesday night tradition.
Instead, we arrived at 8:00 PM (local time), scrambled to get ready, then
headed to the party sans children; if we all went, we wouldn't be able
to get back in the building!
