The crowds were massive again this year and while I didn't have as many issues with them in the past, it's something that the con is going to have to address at some point. I saw lots of badge checks to keep the hotels free of anyone besides con goers and hotel guests. We also didn't stay very late most of the con because of my health issues, so we may have missed some crowds.
Vaping was a bad for me. We were in line for the Walk of Fame on Friday for a while and one of the people nearby was vaping indoors. I'm very sensitive to that sort of thing but thankfully I didn't get too sick. Someone asked her to stop and she got very defensive saying that it was just vapor. Well, it is vapor and other things. I had thought that vaping was not allowed in the convention, but I saw a lot of it.
This isn't necessary a bad, but I wish that either the dealer's room or the Walk of Fame were open earlier than 1 pm on Friday. There are some panels going on before but Friday should honestly be a full day like Saturday and Sunday, especially with some official Dragon Con stuff starting to happen on Thursday.
The worst bad of Dragon Con was not something I experienced myself, but heard about afterwards. Apparently there was more than one sexual assault at the con this year. As a not so strong female, this makes me very uncomfortable. I am usually with my husband most of the con and we don't stay late, but it's not a good thing.
But on that depressing note, onto the good things that have been fixed in previous years!
We didn't get down to the con until Friday morning because we didn't want Emily to miss two days of school. Thankfully the badge pickup process is still great. It took us longer to walk to the Sheraton and inside the building than it did to get our badges.
The main issue we had last year was the bottleneck in the Marriott where you could head back to the blood drive and some track rooms, take the path to the Hyatt one way and take the path to the food court another way. It was a massive mess last year. What they did was put a divider and routed the traffic each way - it worked extremely well so no traffic jams happened.
I've marched in the parade for four or five years. This year the route was changed because of a new street car system they put in. The new staging area seemed to work a lot better than the old one - it was really easy for me to find my group. Plus longer parade makes more room for people to see it.
That's just an overview of the good and bad from Dragon Con - I'll be doing reports of each day over the next week or so!
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