Travels with Jon & Kate Part Two!: Katelyn comes to town!

Jaipur

Katelyn came to visit! It's nice having a sister who works for a school and has summers off :) Katelyn took the red eye flight to Chicago and arrived at 7:30ish Chicago time (an hour earlier than us). We planned to arrive around 8 ish (2 hr drive away), power went off in the middle of the night, I managed to notice and we reset the alarm, but reset it to PM and woke up an hour later than intended. #fail . Got up, realized Jon couldn't come and make it to class on time, threw some clothes on, plugged Ohare into the GPS and off I was to Chicago for my first time! Despite the horrible Chicago drivers, expensive and frequent tolls, and awful road conditions, I managed to make it there unscathed :) And so began the week of games...

Agricola

Burgers at the Beach!

Carcasonne with bridges expansion

Games were everywhere that week. She brought with her Coup, Love Letter, and Hanabi, and her mom sent with her to give to us a Carcassonne expansion and Jaipur. Then we had to play all the games we'd gotten since we'd seen her last (5 tribes, race for the galaxy) as well as games we hadn't played much with her (Agricola, DC Deck building), then we went to GenCon (more on this later), played games there, bought games there, came home and had to play those games (Imperial Assault, Dixit, Tiny Epic Defenders, 5 Tribes and Takenoko Expansions), oh, and we watched about 4 episodes of Tabletop and several episodes of Titan's Grave.

Gen Con!

Ice Cream in St. Joes

We did manage to do a few other things though :) Tuesday after she got in we explored campus a bit while Jon was in class. I had my only shift at Apple Valley that night while they made enchiladas. Wednesday Jon had one class and one final to take. Thursday we went into St. Joes to explore a bit. We ooed and awwed over how much sand they have at their beaches, went to the pet store and the fair trade store, ate delicious burgers on the beach and ice cream at Kilwin's. It was a good afternoon. Later that night, Heather and Jonny came over to play Coup, Love Letter, and Hanabi with us.

Love Letter


Coup!

Hanabi

So this is where all the NW sand went

The next day was GenCon!! We left at 7am to be in Indianapolis by 10. Getting into the main exhibition hall was like walking into the largest game store ever. So awesome. We wandered the exhibits a while before our first event- learning to play 7 Wonders Babel, which was fun because we were curious about the game and wanted to know whether we actually liked it well enough to buy it (we do!), it adds tons more to the game!

7 Wonders Babel

Biggest game store ever!

I was pretty excited because one game I bought (the 5 Tribes expansion), the designer was there and signed my box for me! They also have lots of people dressed in costume, and giant version of games, like giant Star Trek Catan, giant Roborally, giant King of Tokyo, etc. Then a few hours later, we had our second event, a panel discussion with Wil Wheaton, Laura Bailey, and others from Titan's Grave, the RPG show we'd been watching! So cool! My first celebrity sighting! I "knew" Wil Wheaton from Titan's Grave & Tabletop, but also as a kid from Star Trek TNG, so it was pretty cool to see him, and the panel was great. Also at GenCon was Summer Glau (River from Firefly & Serenity). We had a full day of absorbing general gaming awesomeness before heading out around 7:00, to play Dixit over dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Good day.

Giant Star Trek Catan!

7 Wonders Babel

Meeples!

Wil Wheaton!!

Giant King of Tokyo

There's Wil!

Dixit at dinner, after GenCon

The next morning we slept in and made it in time for second serve at One Place. We tried to wait a bit for it to cool down in the afternoon, but eventually we headed out to go hiking at Warren Dunes State Park. Yeesh. Between the mosquitoes and the humidity it wasn't all that great, but at least we all got some exercise before dipping our feet in the lake and heading back for more gaming :) We managed to play about 20 games in 6 days. Monday Katelyn had her flight back, but we left a bit early to try to explore Chicago. We made it to the Bean and were promptly turned away (no dogs!), so we took turns taking pictures and walked the perimeter of the park before heading out. All in all it was a great week with a great girl!