hazelchaz | ...get on the floor. Everybody walk the dinosaur. Open the door, get on the floor. Everybody...

All right, we're up to the last weekend of September. We're heading out first thing Friday morning. How long will it take us to get from Anaheim to San Mateo?

I got up extra early to bake a batch of chocolate croissants, so that we'd have something to munch on as we hit the road. And, since aramina can't have milk (and there's a certain amount of butter even in a plain croissant!) I baked an apple strudel for her. Both from the frozen section at Trader Joe's, by the way -- try them out. (I mentioned the chocolate croissants in my Indy coverage from my August trip.)

At the Lakewood stop, I managed to leave my regular prescription glasses on top of the car and drive away. This meant that I ended up spending the entire weekend wearing my prescription sunglasses. New Rule: I always leave one pair in the car. No carrying the extra pair with me -- I either am wearing the dark pair, or the clear pair, but I don't carry my glasses around with me. I'd already lost the dark glasses from this year's prescription less than a month after I got them, so I've been wearing the dark pair from the set two years ago. And now I've lost the clear set, so I'm wearing the 2-year-old glasses as a daily thing.

I'm also going to go for cheaper frames. I'm tired of these expensive mistakes. The current prescription is on file, I need to order a new pair, but since we found the old clear pair as soon as I got home from the weekend I haven't been all fired up to get it done. So anyhow I drove up to The Tower, not realizing I'd left a pair of glasses on top of Saltine. We picked up ala_mokita, went across the 118 to get Melissa, and headed out for the next hundred miles which would take us to our lunch stop in Santa Barbara.

colleency had given me a couple of places to consider -- La Super-Rica Taqueria, Andersen's Danish Bakery and maybe the original (and last-standing?) Sambo's. The Taqueria (left) had a line a mile long, which we thought was a good sign; but what with that, and the time we spent at the bakery for hot chocolate and such, we were two hours-plus in town before we hit the road again. Perhaps not our wisest decision.

But it was all so good.... We had to try the hot chocolate (right), which was a rich European-style drink. (Recall that while the Aztecs invented chocolate, it took the Europeans to make it taste good. Excuse me, to turn it into a dessert drink. The Dutch and the Swiss are credited with two important chocolate-related inventions: Van Houten with the chocolate press, to extract the cocoa butter out of the cacao beans and later put it back in, and Daniel Peter figured out how to make milk chocolate and teamed up with Henri Nestlé to get it into production. If you want a good source of all things Dutch, including Van Houten chocolate, I recommend "Holland America" in Bellflower. I'll let you find Nestlé products and good Swiss chocolate on your own.)

And I ordered a Sarah Bernhardt cookie for me and Christian to share. (But they brought us one each. One of them's in the foreground of the photo above.) The original Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress who died in 1923, was fond of these and they're named after her because of that. They're basically a hard macaroon base, with a dollop of chocolate mousse on top and a chocolate coating to hold it all together. Legend has it they're supposed to be shaped like a specific piece of her anatomy. I'm guessing an AA cup-sized body part.

And the rhubarb sorbet thing: they had brought around a dessert tray, and the example there was a nice Patty-sized dessert. Christian said he'd try that, and when they brought him one it turned out to be an enormous Christian-sized goblet of delight. Good, but bigger than he wanted, especially considering he had his own hot chocolate and Sarah Bernhardt to get through! We ended up with doggie bags to go. Really, next time we'll just browse the pastry case and get it all "to go" -- we spent far too much by sitting down. Too much money, too much time.

Christian and I weren't in sync with our iced-tea drinking and resulting comfort stops... we didn't have a clue where we'd be getting gas or dinner. (Dinner was at Subway in Greenfield.) And it's really hard to drive in the dark wearing sunglasses. (Christian took the wheel for part of the trip, and even more of the trip on the way back.) The long and the short of it is, after leaving my house at 8:00 am, we arrived at the hotel in San Mateo at about 9 pm.

So that was really too late to be trying to see if Registration was still open, or do anything other than go shopping for our Peanut Butter & Jelly Room. Did we have a good room for that? Well, we were on the same floor that connects to the ballrooms, and on the same hall as Cafe Verfuhren, the "Man Maid" project I'd heard that karisu_sama was a part of (left). Last year it was an official part of the convention, this year it wasn't (although I couldn't tell that from the Y-con LJ posts). But we were really a long hike from the ballrooms. We were in 3077, which actually was at the far end of the hall past Cafe V (which was at the start of the hall) -- so even if you went to Cafe V you wouldn't necessarily have seen it.

We put a sign downstairs, and spread the word a little bit, but we didn't really have much traction getting people to notice we were there. tenkuudragon showed up (right), and a few other people found us Friday night. I'm pretty sure all of them already knew about us.

Friday night, therefore, was mostly us sitting around -- you can see Melissa's working on her knitting (left) -- and waiting for something to happen. (Remind me that if I go back to Yaoi-con next year, I want to arrive before the daytime events end. Possibly leave before dawn? Or Thursday?) We had brought an ice chest with some of the necessities of life -- water, cream soda, iced tea, Coca-Cola in bottles with sugar.