BGGCON 2018, Thanksgiving, and Heading “Home”
It’s amazing how time can fly by so quickly. I remember when I was a child how a year seemed a long time, and now I can blink and two months go by. My personal belief it has something to do with how much a day is versus being a percentage of our lives. For an 8 year old child, a year could be 12% of their life – that’s a lot! For me, it’s more like 2% (you can do the math 😉 ). Which is a long winded way of saying that time flies sometimes.
Last time we talked, I posted a tour of our awesome Dutch apartment. Since then, we’ve added a few things, so I’ll be posting a new tour sometime soon.
Billy and I were in the US from early November to mid-December. We were notified by IND (Dutch Immigration) that they needed some more information from us, so we flew back to get those things taken care of. It’s been good to be back. 🙂
Sounds like it’s time for a little trip recap. 🙂
In November (2018) we flew from the Netherlands; from Amsterdam to someplace (it’s always someplace…I think it was Detroit this time) to Denver, where we relaxed for a few days. I say relaxed but it involved grocery shopping and voting and ordering important papers and laundry and repacking Billy for a work trip, which he flew out for on Monday. I went to a friend’s house on Monday and spent the night, and played boardgames and planned to post a blog… I also had a work meeting, electronically, that evening, which cut into our gaming time, but it was important and important things got done.
I spent the rest of that week seeing a few more people and running errands and packing myself for flying to Dallas that weekend…for BGGCON!!! 😀
Billy and I met at BGGCON the first year they had a Team Geek (volunteer group) so each year we go back to enjoy the con, volunteer, and share the joy with our fellow Team Geek members.
The past few years, we’ve provided cake or cupcakes (gluten free, so they’re safe for me) . This year we had them spell out Congratulations Nikki and Billy, but of course we had it done in Dutch. 😀
BGGCON has a yearly theme. Sometimes it’s more obvious than others. This year it was the 80’s and it was everywhere! The hotel had a great time putting out posters and such around the hotel with the bright 80’s look and logos, and put out a display of candy and pink lemonade one day. Fun stuff.
(This blog’s software has changed, so now there’s an option to create a gallery of pictures. It’s giving you a preview of the pictures, not the whole thing, so we’ll see if I like this feature or not. Let me know if you have opinions.)
The folks who have been on Team Geek for BGGCON every time so far… 
A rare sighting of the Canadian Roger, found at BGGCON. We actually got to play a game together, yay. 🙂 
I was rocking the 80’s ponytail; Billy was om-nom-nomming. 
Another good friend from BGGCON. 
The hotel joined in the convention’s 80’s theme with candy in the lobby and decor around the hotel. 
Saturday night giveaways are always fabulous fun. 
The rare Teotihuacan start player candle token. 
The rare stingray start player token promo for Underwater Cities. Only one in the world has it, as far as we know.
Billy and I are working on letting go of things, and we are sometimes silly, so we combined those two and created “rare start player token promos” that we put with a few games (and made sure they got packed in with the games at the end of the con). We’re curious to see how people react when they open them up later, heehee.
I love going to BGGCON and checking out the new games, playing games I don’t have access to in my personal collection, and most of all, getting to see people I adore. It’s become a homecoming for me, and I look forward to it so much. I’m so glad we were able to make it happen, even with the international move, and it looks like we’re on track for 2019 too.
Next it was off to Michigan for Thanksgiving. We flew directly from Dallas, taking all of our newly acquired games with us. Here’s our luggage, 3 which we checked as they were mostly games (with our clothing for padding).
We spent a lot of time with family, at the house, at other people’s houses, and at the funeral home and funeral itself. It was good to get to see everyone. Billy and I spent a significant amount of time buried under children. 🙂
My niece loves to put hair clips in my hair, so I brought almost every single one I could find with me for her entertainment. She used all of them as well. I’m quite fond of the rainbow crown she gave me in the front. 🙂
Back to Denver
We returned to Denver to prepare for various things. HexaCon, the boardgaming convention we started in 2018 was coming up mid-January 2019, but we had actually found someone else in the community interested – and excited! – to run it instead. Remember that earlier online meeting during game night? It was to get the board’s buy in and sign off on the new convention Chair. Hurray!
We had also planned on taking some time to continue going through things still at the Colorado house and getting the place more organized.
Instead we heard from the Dutch government that they needed a few more things from us in the next 6 weeks, so change of plans! We got plane tickets for three weeks later (tickets right away are pricey, but we couldn’t wait too long to get going).
Before we left we tidied what we could, cleared floors in areas of the house used by others, and packed ourselves up again.
Since we got last minute-ish tickets, we had less optimal baggage options. I had been planning on bringing back 4 pieces of checked luggage (full mainly of boardgames and a few mementos), but our tickets came with zero. None. No checked luggage at all.
Our travel itinerary was Denver -> Ft. Lauderdale -> Gatwick London -> Amsterdam, on 3 different airlines, so we would have to pay luggage fees on each one. Not particularly ideal. We decided to go with plan B: shipping.
We ended up packing 3 pretty sizable boxes, weighing 40-60 lbs each and sending them via USPS the week we left. More on that story in another post, I think.
Denver International Airport (DIA) is going through some major renovations and has whole sections closed off for the construction. There are also all sorts of amusing rumors and stories about the original construction; secret tunnels, Illuminati connections, lizard people, and so on. The folks at DIA decided to have fun with it in their construction posters. 🙂
Denver’s main airport has a sense of humor about amusing theories and their construction. 
Denver’s main airport has a sense of humor about amusing theories and their construction. 
Denver’s main airport has a sense of humor about amusing theories and their construction.
Denver airport has some interesting decorations around Christmas.
For international flights, I’m a fan of seating that has 2 seats next to the windows (outer walls) and four across the middle. Sadly we keep getting planes with a 3-3-3 configuration, so Billy and I are climbing across some poor stranger who ended up next to us (at least they got an aisle seat?). One of these 3-3-3s is the “Dreamliner” line of planes, but they have a cool feature: instead of the pull down window shade, there’s a button that tints the window. It has about 6 settings, so you’ve got a lot of variation. This I love. I get a little carsick sometimes, so I spend a lot of time staring out the window. To Billy’s disappointment, I really like sitting next to the window, because I can look out and fix my stomach. But on international flights, it’s often *really* sunny above those clouds, with people trying to sleep and all. With the tinted windows, I can knock it down one dot from fully dark to mostly dark, and be able to see out the window without blinding everyone. Yay technology.
I haven’t been to England for many years now, so flying though Gatwick was a little weird and a lot familiar. We had a few minutes before our gate was announced, so I got to check out their Harry Potter shop (not shoppe, as I would have expected).
While waiting at the gate, I also got one of my favorite things from England; Walker’s Cheese and Onion crisps. Mmmm…
(That’s my happy for the crisps but I’m tired face. We had been traveling for about 17 hours by that point.)
We knew Schiphol Airport a lot better by now, so once we landed, we knew where to go (mostly) and how to get there. A rare snow had fallen, and does actually impact the train tracks, so our first choice of train wasn’t running (it was a Sunday as well), so we took our second choice, which extended our travel by about 20 minutes. We were ok with this. Two or so hours later, we climbed up the stairs to our Dutch home and collapsed in an untidy heap (as those Brits would say). Glad to be home.
The cupcakes say “Gefeliciteerd Nikki en Billy!”. We also had them make a cupcake with a meeple on it, because it’s BGG.CON! 😀
I really enjoy reading you blog. Thanks for sharing :).