I’m not going to talk about Saturday too much — I drove up to Estes Park and through Denver, looking at hotels. Shopping for anything that requires the contemplation of large sums of money being spent (even if it’s not your own), and an all-day outting is just generally exhausting.

Randy talks about the trip here, and I’ll let him handle the details of the day.

Suffice it to say that things didn’t exactly turn out the way we expected: we’ve managed to make the Stanley much more affordable as a Con venue, and the Radisson turned out to be a pricing nightmare. I think what we are going to end up doing is go for the Stanley Hotel (where King wrote the Shining) — we can find cheaper, faceless venues easily, but we think we can do it, and the people up there have been very helpful, and if we decide now, we can spend the next 7 months figuring out ways to make the whole con less expensive. From this, we should be able to find out, empircally, how important a cool venue is.

Case in point: the vans from the airport to the hotel and back again looked like they were going to cost around 55 bucks a person round trip. Not great, cheaper than renting a car, but not great. Rey found a place today that will get us a bigger van for less money — it looks like a LOT less — at least half, and maybe about a quarter orginal estimates, per person, depending on how many people opt to use it — more is better.

I don’t know how Simone does this every year, I really don’t. Maybe the first year is the worst.

Amber people: try not to turn the comments list for this post into a ‘venue vs. games’ post — I’m seven months from the Con and I’m already sick to death of it.