Conventional Wisdom: Traveling Solo

Okay, I should be able to post the extra Otakon 2017 comics shortly after I get back from AWA, but I wanted to go ahead and get this out before I hit the road, because it’s relevant to that soon-to-happen trip: Do you ever travel to conventions solo?

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that , anti-social as it sounds, I‘ve really come to enjoy heading all the way out to a con on my lonesome. At least, I do NOW. Time was, once, that I NEVER ventured out to a convention without a van full of people. Even heading down to the hometown Animazement inevitably involved at least one or two other people in the van, so you’d better believe that heading out of state involved a whole caravan. Literally. The travel party for my first trip to Otakon was at LEAST three cars long, with the van itself jammed to absolute capacity. And don’t get me wrong, there’s fun to be had in traveling with a whole gaggle of friends, especially if your travel route includes ones of THOSE stretches of highways. You know the ones: two uninterrupted hours of trees and empty exits, constantly looking at the back of that same 18—wheeler, no variation. Yeah, having other people on hand to chat with is a VERY good thing in those situations. Buuuuut there’s also plenty of downsides to traveling in big groups, not the least of which being actually getting everybody to the same place at the same time. I mean, have you SEEN the average con-goer? Do you realize how much shouting and prodding it takes just to get us to STAND IN A LINE properly? Actually operating a small fleet of motor vehicles in a coordinated fashion is simply beyond us most of the time. I can’t tell you how much time we’d lose every trip from just sitting around in parking lots, waiting for everyone to reconvene long enough to get back on the road at the same time. There’s always be that one car that missed a turn or needed to stop at a different restaurant than everyone else or isn’t staying at the same hotel and everybody's complaining about everybody and blah blah blah. It’s herding cats, is what I’m saying.  

 Of course, that’s assuming you’re DRIVING to the con, which isn’t really a fair assumption for me to be making. Obviously, if you’re heading across the country, you’re probably flying… which, believe it or not, I’ve never done. I mean, I’ve flown before, but never to a convention. All my con trips have been terrestrial, either by car or by bus or by train. For all I know, having a travel posse with you while traveling via mass transit is a lot of fun. I know most of my bus-based con trips would have been a lot better with at least one extra person tagging along. Not for the loneliness factor, but just the basic practical need to carry things.  That’s one thing I learned very quickly while living in DC: the convention life is NOT one that’s well suited to public transportation. Trying to condense a weekend’s worth of supplies AND crazy costumes AND props AND whatever Artist Alley stuff was involved all down to a mass that one single person could fit onto a train or bus… I’m still not sure how I actually managed a few of the trips I did. I managed to pull of combinations of TARDIS-level fitting things inside things smaller than them with ant-level carrying of weights I never should have been able to lift for MILES. Oh, and don’t forget the WONDERFUL sensation of camping out on the floor of a bus station in the middle of the night, clinging your suitcase, trying not to make eye contact with the crackhead who might actually LIVE on that bench over there. That’s LOTS of fun to do solo. 

But I don’t do that anymore, do I? Since I moved back to Raleigh, all my convention trips have been van-based, and those honestly have become a lot of fun to do solo. Obviously, it’s a LOT easier to transport luggage with an entire vehicle all to one’s self, and it’s simultaneously a lot easier for one person to stick to a schedule AND way less stressful when that one person deviates from it. I mean, who’s gonna complain about me stopping at Sheetz to pee AGAIN if it’s just me and Servo and Scribbles in the van? They know better than to give me grief about how long things are taking. And to re-hash previous blogs & comics again, I really do love a nice leisurely solo road trip. Start up a nice playlist, crank up the air conditioner, plan a route that DOESN’T involve a lot of traffic, and hitting the road for a few hours can really be a lot of fun. All of life’s problems boil down to not driving off the road by accident and deciding if that truck stop looks safe enough to pee at. The more complicated grown up life gets, the more I like that kind of simplicity.

Still, I totally get why a lot of people just can’t do long trips solo. For one thing, I’m MUCH better wired for surviving in solitude than most people. I’ve heard plenty of stories of people having props in the seat next to them just to have SOMETHING to talk to before isolation drove them crazy. I mean, I’m not immune to talking to myself on long trips either, but in my case, it’s mostly to avoid nodding off. Anyone who’s ever met me knows that I’m JUST FINE not speaking out loud for hours and hours at a time. But that’s another thing: not everybody is physically capable of driving for too long on their own. People get sleepy or sore or just zone out after too long, and that’s nothing to play around with. Heck, for all my bragging about how much I like solo drives, even I have to pull over a LOT to keep my head clear. Heck, for this latest AWA trip, I’m finishing my packing a whole DAY ahead of time to make sure I’ve got as much time as possible to sleep, just to make sure I don’t start nodding off at the wheel. If there’s even the slightest question of your ability to dive yourself solo, don’t do it. And then there’s the more mundane things, like the financial obstacles of traveling alone. I am NOT looking forward to having nobody to split the cost of gas with this time, I can tell you that. The fact that I can and do live out of a cooler all weekend instead of buying food on the road helps, but that’s still a lot of money that would otherwise be split a lot of ways. And by far, the WORST thing is the inability to tweet silly roadtrip pictures while at the wheel. I mean, you gotta have your priorities in order, right?