August 10, 2011

A TARDIS, a leaky air bed and 30 hours of driving...



Saturday was hubby’s birthday and as a present he wanted to go to Gen Con. What is Gen Con you ask? Well, it’s a place where all geeks meet to play designer board-games. This event takes place in Indianapolis which is about 15 hours from Montreal. On Thursday we drove all the way to Cleveland, with a little stop in Buffalo for lunch. I managed to get some great shots of Buffalo’s architecture so maybe there will be a Buffalo piece in the future. On Friday there were only 5 hours of driving left, we did have to make a little D-tour to Young’s Jersey Dairy for the best milkshake in the world. 

We arrived in Indianapolis around 2pm and drove to the convention center right away to check out the convention. After we picked up our badges and checked out our goody bag we spent the afternoon exploring geek heaven. There were games being played everywhere! There was an area for people who had created there own dungeons to play games like Descent, amazingly detailed creations with fountains, treasures and dragons. We checked out the art exhibit en everywhere you looked there were tons of new and old games to play. In the exhibit hall I was overjoyed to encounter my first TARDIS! I’m a huge Doctor Who geek so getting your picture taken with the TARDIS is a big deal, my weekend was made at that point and we hadn’t even started playing games yet!

On Saturday we had a full day at the convention and we made the most of it by trying out a ton of new games and scoring some nice deals on some of them as well. We played until 9 in the evening after which our brains were pretty much fried from learning so many new rules. 

We had to start out drive back home on Sunday morning and since we didn’t want to drive 15 hours straight we had packed our camping gear for a night our in the woods. We had to drive 10 hours to the camp site and arrived just in time to pitch the tent before dark. We were both pretty exhausted after that 10 hour drive so after dinner we crawled into our cozy little tent for a fitful night of sleep in the fresh air. Unfortunately we hadn’t checked out air bed before we left and in the middle of the night we woke on the hard forest floor instead of our nice air cushioned  bed. Luckily we own one of those electric pumps so we didn’t have to blow it up ourselves. It wasn’t so fortunate for the other campers though, because our pump sounds like a vacuum cleaner, not the nicest sound in the middle of the night, I think by morning the whole camp-site knew we had a leak.

We had chosen our camp-site because it was close to this gorge you could walk through. So after breakfast we packed up our stuff and went for a beautiful walk. The gorge was absolutely gorgeous! with beautiful waterfalls and amazing rock formations.We were imagining ourselves in this fairytale world where we would be hiking to the castle to visit the dragon.  

After this amazing weekend it is now time to return to the real world and get back to work, fortunately for me that means returning to making art! It’s been great to get away for a couple of days and be in a completely different world for a while, but it’s wonderful to return to the studio as well. I’m excited to finish my Fredericton piece and I’m at the half-way point for the first piece of my collaboration project for which I had a meeting this morning. Fortunately my partner loved the composition so I can move to the next stage. My show is only two weeks away so I’m very excited for that as well. I am so fortunate that I’m getting all these opportunities and I’m just bursting with inspiration. And when I look to my right there’s now a little TARDIS on my desk ready to take me to wonderful places whenever I need to escape for a little while...








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