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[ornerybitch.livejournal.com]

I want to preface this by saying overall I had a fantastic time this year. I love DragonCon and coming home is always sad after being at a giant nerd party for 3 days. Most of the staff I dealt with were incredibly patient and friendly, the panels and events I made it to were fantastic, and overall I had a wonderful weekend. However, I did have two gripes and I'm sure the poor staff are tired of hearing about at least one if not both of them.

I know this is a huge complaint every year, but the crowds were insane. Friday was fine and Sunday was tolerable, but Saturday I pretty much skipped. We watched the parade, got lunch, attempted to walk around for a bit, but quickly ran into masses of people at a total standstill. My husband and I failed to find any uncrowded area and eventually hoofed it back to our hotel room and just skipped everything we planned on doing that day. I'm really thankful we did after hearing people talk of getting stuck in the habitrails for half an hour. I've been to DragonCon enough times to know crowds happen and you deal with them, but I can't recall them being that bad the last time I attended. Maybe it's because I missed the explosion of crowding in the three years I wasn't able to attend.

The other issue I encountered was with the shuttle bus. We stayed at the Twelve Hotel (holy crap that is an AWESOME place to stay, btw) and we managed to catch the bus back most of the time... But I don't think the drivers were given clear instructions. When we caught the bus Friday one driver was explaining the route to two other drivers and they were ALL complaining about the lack of information they had been given. I don't know if the convention can do anything about that or if it's a problem with the bus company.

The stop at the Marriott wasn't the one listed in the con book, they stopped at the MARTA sign at the intersection diagonally across from what was listed. The buses weren't labelled to reflect if they were for the express route or overflow route, but it's good they at least had signs in the window saying they were the DragonCon buses. While the bus would take us to the Twelve they never stopped at the Twelve for pickup. They often deviated from the route so they could just drop off people and head back to the Marriott. By Sunday I think the drivers just gave up on trying because we waited for about an hour for a bus and watched one of them zoom by the stop without slowing down. We managed to flag down the second bus and got back to our hotel around midnight.

The Twelve is not far from the convention but even in the best times I'm a slow walker because of flat feet and bad knees. This weekend I managed to sprain my ankle so the short walk to the convention became a slow hobble. When we could catch them the buses saved me a lot of pain. In the past we always managed to snag a room at the host hotels so I've never had to use the shuttle system before. I don't know if it's always like this or if this is actually a vast improvement on past years. It was just painfully apparent to me because I managed to cripple myself for half the weekend.