Home! It's good to be home. As much as I love seeing my friends (and family), there's nothing quite as happy-making as sleeping in my own little bed (and knowing what city I'm in when I wake up in the morning).

The trip to Kansas went well, I think. I haven't been to a costume con in many, many years. While I did anticipate that an anime con would feature a lot of cosplay, I was somewhat surprised by the number and variety of costumes worn by attendees. Rapunzel and I were admiring the more creative costumes as we wandered from panel to panel. (After a while, I started feeling silly for not being in costume. I felt out of place!)

It takes very little snow to disrupt Kansas traffic so when a storm moved in on Saturday afternoon, Pippi and the L-i-K-S packed up my stuff and Rapunzel's and came down to the hotel where we all stayed over until Sunday. That was fun, because it meant we could keep attending panels until midnight.

Surprisingly enough, the weekend panels I enjoyed the most were the more generic ones--ones on the history of Toonami (and its affect on today's USofA anime fans), the star panel with voice actors, and the history and disappearance of OVAs. I didn't recognize "Toonami" when it appeared on the panel list but it turns out that I've seen at least a few episodes of all the most popular Toonami programs. Who knew?

The more specialized ones--chick gamers, etc.--turned out to be much less interesting. (There was nothing wrong with the topics, they were uninteresting because they had moderators who weren't quite sure how to lead a panel and who, in consequence, sat in front of the room and told endless and pointless personal anecdotes tangentially related to the subject matter.)

The two panels that Rapunzel was most excited about, the ones on dollfies, were both very good. I hadn't expected to be particularly interested in those, but the presenters really knew their material and there were a lot of different sizes and brands of dolls there to look at. Really, much cooler than I'd thought.

I spent, I am proud to say, very little money in the dealer's room. Mindful of the fact that I was experimenting with traveling "carry-on," I bought a couple of buttons, that's all.

Anyhow. I hope Rapunzel had fun. I think she did--she talked about going to the con again next year, so I think her first convention experience was fun for her.

In fact, it all went very well until I got home. Owing to a complicated variety of events, I was parked rather far from my usual outlying parking lot. I didn't anticipate this would be a problem--I've driven to and from that airport 30 times since it opened--so, after I'd scraped six inches of melted snow and ice off of my car, I hopped in, retraced my inbound route, found my road, and started happily, if tiredly, homeward.

Only.

It wasn't my road. I don't know what road it was.

I'm sure that at one point I drove under an overpass that was the road I needed, but there was no ramp, so I couldn't actually get to it.

Not a problem, I thought. After all, all roads lead to Rome, or something like that. It's Denver. All I needed was a reasonably major east-west road and I could get home.

I drove and I drove and I drove. No such roads appeared. In fact, since it was now long after sunset, the complete absence of any kind of city lights made it appear as though I was halfway to Wyoming. Eventually I came to an intersection large enough to warrant a stoplight. The crossroad was 140th street and I live at about -15, so I'd gone about 155 blocks too far north. But! It went west, so I took it.

And I drove and I drove and I drove. Having granted my wish for an east-west road, I guess the gods of asphalt decided to take the rest of the night off, so none of them heard my subsequent plea for a north-south artery.

I drove west for about six or seven years. Then, knowing I was too far north anyhow, I found a road that sort of promised to go north-south and took it a mile or so south--where it abruptly turned into a dead-end, forcing me to turn back east and eventually--wait for it--dumping me back out on 140th street.

I drove back on 140th for a while but it was feeling no more generous with north-south roads than it had been earlier. I found a Colorado highway and, under the assumption that it, at least, would not turn into a dead end, I took it, even though it seemed to be headed more east than south.

I drove on it for a while, pondering the fact that if you're in an unfamiliar part of a large city and you're accustomed to navigating by the mountains--invisible at night--you can't really be sure of your compass heading. (Also? Roads and highways in Denver are frequently labeled "north" or "west" but that doesn't mean the roads actually go "north" or "west." Sometimes a road labeled "west" will head dead-south or straight north for several miles.) Eventually I ran into--brace yourself--144th street. After 15 minutes of driving, I was four blocks farther from home and I no longer had the faintest clue where I was, east-west-north-south, in relation to any part of Denver I've ever seen before.

My options at this point were, (A) pull over and have a meltdown, (B) find a hotel and go to bed (not unrelated to (A)), or (C) call the R.C.

There's a reason she's the Resident Consultant. I found an intersection large enough to be labeled (in a suburb I've never even heard of before), pulled into a parking lot, called the R.C., and demanded that she Mapquest me and find out what freaking reality I was in.

Because she's good at that kind of thing, she talked me off the ledge, put up with my refusal to get back on the same highway that had been dumping me out on 140th street all night, and navigated me back to "my" part of town.

I am not suffering from early dementia! I think that needs to be stated, very clearly. I have a very bad sense of direction, I always have had, and I rely very heavily on being able to see the Front Range when I'm traveling around Denver.

You probably think that's all pretty weird. Wait until you hear the story of my second trip.