Day 1 was spent mainly travelling. We were up at 5am, leaving the house just after 6am for Manchester airport. The SatNav battery ran out while still on the motorway resulting in several minutes of swearing about the loss of the charger while moving house last week. But we found the car park we’d booked into and checked in without any trouble.

The flight was on time and before we knew it we were off! It was a long flight, 8 hours and by the end of it I was too warm, had a bit of a headache & feeling kind of crappy. Which did not make the next stage of the flight any better 😦  We landed in Atlanta, Georgia for our connecting flight and the queues to get through customs were terrible. They have an automated passport check in for people who have been to the USA before. “Great” we thought ” less queueing”. Nope. Part of the process is to scan your fingerprints. Rachel broke her finger as a child & has limited movement to it, so that finger wouldn’t scan. So she had to go in a different queue to have her passport checked. It took about 2 hours too get through as they had a large line of people and only 2 officers processing them 😦

At that point it was after 3pm local time & our tickets said our next flight was at 4.20pm. Except it also said we would land at 2.18pm, we landed at 1.18pm so I thought the times on the tickets were an hour out  We belted down towards security and found yet another huge queue. By the time we got through it was nearly 3.30 and I really thought we’d missed our connection.

No! Fortunately the take off for the connection was correct at 4.20 and we got to the gate just as boarding started. By that point we’d had enough of airports! The last flight was only an hour and very quick ( I fell asleep – that helped!)

No messing around once we reached Indianapolis, grabbed luggage and jumped in a taxi. Indianapolis was not what I expected. It looked very clean, large open roads, lots of food places. We checked in at the hotel and then went to meet the guildies!

It seems everyone is staying at the same hotel! I didn’t realise 😀 Samius was already in the lobby, we’re joined a few minutes later by Aldrac who has also flown out from the UK, then Torrance & Tobril. It was really great to finally meet everyone! And we immediately fell into the usual conversation patter we have when playing online.

Food is the next step, with more general chatter, then we walk around to the convention centre so Rach & I can pick up our badges and event tickets. Once done we decide to see if we can get a board game in. We find a mammoth Settlers of Catan available, and a mammoth Star Trek version also. As there are 8 of us (we also have Ben & John with us, friends of Tobril) that works out great 😀

And then, as we’re playing Lessah arrives! More hugs and hellos! And she has brought us some ground coffee to try which just looks yummy and some spicy crispy things (tacis?) that are great! Unfortunately we will have to wait until we get home before we can try the coffee..

But, by just after 10pm local time we are wiped. We’ve been awake nearly 24 hours and decide to call it a night.