Awright, so quick recap for those of you who didn't survive all the way to the end of the Anthrocon II: A Good Day to Anthocon Harder journal. I hung out with  Nevir and  Ryoken at Anthrocon, who mentioned that they lived in Denver and were planning on attending Rocky Mountain Fur Con, conveniently also in Denver. I talked about how I would be traveling to Chicago for  AceFox27's going away party in a few weeks, which is within arm's reach of Denver if your arms happen to be made of commercial passenger aircraft. And we all live in the house that Jack built. So the wondertwins said that they'd be happy to host me at their bungalow in the gap between attending the party and attending the convention, O'Hare and Denver both being major commuter airport hubs it would be insultingly easy to fly between them and I should have it made in the shade. Can't wait to hear how I screw this up? Well fortunately you don't have to! Meet me down in the next paragraph.

So, I have a number of contacts in the Ohio River Valley that I thought I might bring into this, partly because they never visit and I'll only see them if I take the initiative and partly because a straight shot to Chicago by car would take more than 10 hours. So I had the brilliant plan of bringing the total number of destinations and people involved in this trip up to five and six, respectively. That went about as well as you'd think it would, going screwy in ways I never could've conceived. So, initially I'd meant to leave my ancestral home in western New York and head to Canton, OH to meet up with an old Navy buddy. Then I'd hit up the party in Chicago, probably sleep over at his place, then come back down to Garrett, IL to stay with my best friend from high school for a few days before my flight out of Chicago. A little aerial pirouette and one furry convention later I'd be back in Chicago. I could then proceed to the University of Misleadingly Named Locations, Miami College in Oxford, OH, and from there to home. A solid plan, I'd just have to get in touch with everyone along the way and make sure all the logistics came out okay. Easy! I'm glad that made those connections early because precisely none of those driving destinations were okay with my plan.

My friend in Canton informed me that he would cease being in Canton at the end of this month because he was moving to attend none other than Miami College in Oxford. Ya can't make this stuff up. Anyways, "that'll save time" I naively thought as I called my contact in Oxford to see if I could combine the two destinations into one. Turns out that he is leaving Oxford early in August because Miami College has taught him everything that it can about confusing Google Maps with baffling street addresses. So he will shortly not be in his present location as well. In Chicago they're also in the process of moving (hence why I'm going out there in the first place) and wouldn't be able to put me up for any noteworthy length of time. And of course my friend in Garrett works two jobs to support the two new women in his life (He has a wife and a daughter. Why, what did you think I meant?) so he was unavailable during the time I'd be wanting to bed down in Indiana. All this made both my ground and flight travel plans infeasible in a dozen different ways. Oh, and did I mention that all of these people operate on entirely different communication frequencies? I hear from Ryoken mostly through FA, Nevir and my friend from Oxford I have on my cell, the guy in Garrett is on Facebook (sometimes), I communicate with Canton through the Steam network.

So yeah, I had a bunch of dates and locations and travel times written down, and set my mind to the task of figuring out a vacation that was phrased a lot like an extremely aggressive SAT question. It was about this time that I got a letter from my college telling me that I made the Dean's List for last semester. Bolstered with the knowledge that I'm at least smart enough to be extremely good at colleging, I took on my new challenge. Canton is right out, no contact there anymore and certainly no reason to go to Canton without anyone in town there. The second-closest destination was Garrett, a trifling eight hours by car. My window of opportunity opens early there though, so by leaving sooner I can make that destination work. That puts me just 3.5 hours away from the party just outside Chicago, but I no longer have the time to spread my wings and fly there, thanks to the ultimatum from Oxford. So, after the party I'll have to find a nearby hotel so that I can be fresh for the drive to Oxford the next day. I'll get to be there for the last of my friend's tenure at Miami College and probably be unwittingly roped into helping him move but whatever it's been a long time since I've done anything useful. The problem then being that I'm much too far out for a back-and-forth to Chicago again to make any sense, so I had to give up my dream of cheap, simple direct flights in exchange for the expensive and dauntingly counterintuitive less ideal flights out of the less ideal but nearby Cincinnati. This means waking up my contacts in Denver at ass O'clock in the morning to come rescue me from the airport. My understanding of the topography out there is that the Denver terminal is not particularly near the actual-populated-city part of Denver, but I'm sure that my hosts there were aware of this when they generously offered to come and retrieve me once they flew in. I do hate putting them out like this, but they were literally the only portion of my itinerary with any flexibility in it. Speaking of inflexible pigeonholing, after I'm done playing with people in brightly colored animal costumes over the weekend, there's another poorly-timed flight back to Cincinnati to be flown. I'll be back on the ground far too late to consider taking on the nine or so hours of driving that I have remaining before I'm back home again, so I'll head back to Oxford to find that my previous friend there has been handily replaced by another one. I can visit with him for some indeterminate period and get some by then desperately needed rest before embarking on my journey home. And then once I get home I have about three days before I have to pack up and head back to college. Which is going to be a whole other disaster in itself, I'm sure. Yay.

In any case, this new grand solution of mine is at least physically possible if not particularly simple or convenient, and should still allow me to hit all the wickets I'd meant to at the outset. I've not the vaguest idea of what I'll actually be doing at any of these disparate and variegated locations (oh, I guess I've moved onto the vocabulary and reading comprehension section of the SAT now) because for some reason the bulk of my available processing power has been devoted to communications and figuring out exactly how to put myself in the correct locations at the available times. I'm sure I'll think of something. And even if I don't think of something though, I'll be with friends, and that's what really counts. Hell, the whole trip is pretty much leapfrogging between my academic, Navy and furry social circles, which overlap in such wonderful ways in Acefox's case. So, for the first time in awhile, I'm sure everything will be fine. Now then, onward, to adventure!

Since my last con was just a few weeks ago, I'm just going to list the stuff that has changed since I posted my Anthrocon Meme, namely, the details of the convention itself.

Where are you staying?
 nevir and  ryoken's pad, and presumably their room at the con if they live far enough away to merit one. Those two put up with me quite well for some reason.

What day are you getting there?
The morning of the 6th. Which is a Wednesday, I think. Calendars are hard.

How are you traveling?
See above. If any of that mess works, that's how I'll be getting there.

Who will you hang out with during the convention?
Tough call. I've never been to this con before, nor do I know too many people near the geographic center of the nation. We'll see how it goes.

Are there any panels or events you might be attending?
This is another tough one to answer. The RMFC website is pretty vague on what their programming actually is, so I don't really know. It's listed that they have a writing track, but I've checked with the usual crew and none of them are on it. That'll still be something to check out though.