The Ubercon Report: Part One: Getting There is Half the Fun

As many of you know, N and I went to Ubercon this weekend in Parsippany, New Jersey, which I think of as “Parsnippity, NJ.” Herein lies the account of our journey, in segments separated by topics. N and I traveled there with his roommate J~ and his other roommate, J~‘s girlfriend M~. Two members of NYU’s sci-fi club were also there, but they didn’t go with us, and we didn’t really hang out, we just said ‘hi’ a few times.

Ubercon left many driving directions on their website – but no mass transit directions. We called the hotel, which told us to take a bus from Penn Station. So on Saturday we set off, took the bus, and promptly got off and the correct stop 45 minutes later only to find ourselves standing in a median. The hotel was nowhere to be seen. So we called – and the hotel sent a shuttle. But there was a good 15 to 20 minutes while we stood in a median, and just outside a strip mall, wondering what was going on.

And we should have considered ourselves lucky, because leaving the Con was a million times worse!

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Due to the 2 feet of snow you may have noticed today, the busses stopped running, making our return tickets useless. There were no taxis or car services running either. So M~ put up signs around the con saying we’d give people money for a ride to the nearest train station.

Not long afterwards we found some scraggly young conventioneers from Boston who provided us with a driver. We paid him off, and some nice burly fellows in the parking lot helped push his car out of the snow bank/parking lot. Our driver was a funny guy, extremely positive and a skilled driver, considering the condition of the roads. He was heard to remark:

“Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.”

When we finally got to the train station it was like a one-act play, or a disaster film. Some guy (40-ish, clearly from NJ) joined us who was obviously nuts – he’d just walked there from some number of miles away. Two idiotic women from Oklahoma arrived a little while later. They explained their woeful tale of flight cancellation at Laguardia, and then how they had – inexplicably – decided to go back to their original hotel in East Hanover, NJ to spend the night. They were having a really hard time getting back. There was also a level-headed local woman, and some guy waiting in his car.

After an hour of listening to the Oklahoma-southern-drawl, the train finally arrived. Then it took 2 hours to make a 45 minute journey – not back to Grand Central, but back to Hoboken, where we took the PATH to the subway and home again.

Meanwhile, I checked my voicemail. On Saturday, my roommate had locked herself out! All three people with spare keys were out of town all weekend, so she ended up changing the locks. Good thing she was home when I got there.

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