Two months ago, we flew to Boston to attend PAX East and to visit our friends who live there. Not only have I neglected to write about this trip for two months, I never even wrote about the PAX that we attended in Seattle two years ago.

PAX is the abbreviation for the Penny Arcade Expo, which is an annual (now biannual) gaming convention hosted by the guys that write the Penny Arcade web comic. The convention is a mix of workshops, discussion panels, and concerts, along with a gigantic expo hall, tabletop gaming tournaments, and free play console gaming and PC gaming rooms. It’s kind of like the largest LAN party ever.

We scheduled a flight leaving Richmond on a Thursday evening. Eric and I left work early so that we could arrive at the airport on time. We checked in, printed our tickets, and made it all the way to our gate – and then we discovered that our flight had been canceled during the few minutes that had passed while we were going through security. After contemplating driving to Boston overnight, we opted to reschedule our flight for the next morning.

This was Dash’s first time on an airplane, as well as his first time out of Virginia. Eric held him in his lap on the plane, and Dash hardly cried at all. In fact, he slept almost the entire time.

John picked us up from the airport in Boston. He had borrowed a car seat from a coworker for Dash. We got a quick tour of Boston as he drove us through the city to his apartment. He lives on the first floor of a cute house in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

We dropped off our luggage and met John’s roommate, Andrea, and her previous house guest who was just leaving, a cute girl from Germany who was on her way to Canada. John entertained Dash with the pots and pans (or was Dash entertaining John?) while Eric and I packed a backpack in preparation for spending the rest of the day at the convention center.

The convention center didn’t open until 2:00 pm, so John took us out to lunch at a restaurant that specialized in vegetarian food and local beer. Totally our kind of place.

Of course, Dash went everywhere with us. He is such a good baby. He doesn’t sleep as much as he used to, but we can still take him out without the fear that he will scream the whole time. Just give him a spoon or some keys or some sunglasses, and he will be happy.

After lunch, we made our way to the convention center and found that a line had already formed. It was so long that it wrapped around the building. Attendees began waiting in line hours before the doors were scheduled to open to ensure that they would get a seat in the main theater where Wil Wheaton would be giving the keynote speech. Needless to say, the theater had already reached its capacity by the time that we got inside. I was so bummed.

Since we couldn’t get into the highly anticipated keynote speech, we wandered around the convention center. It was positively packed. The common areas were hallways filled with Sumo bean bags, and those lucky enough to find a place to sit were either digging through their swag bags and flipping through the PAX program, or they were playing some kind of game. We brought our Nintendo DS and played a lot of Desktop Tower Defense. We also got back into Magic The Gathering after getting free starter decks in our swag bags.

We made our way into one of the console free play rooms. The room was filled with rows and rows of flat screen TVs hooked up to Xboxs, Wiis, and Playstations. Here, we could check out (like at a library) almost any game for any modern system. There was a separate room for retro gaming.

John played with Dash while Eric waited in line to check out a game for us to play.

Eric picked the game Heavy Rain after remembering that he had read some positive reviews, including a comment written by one of the Penny Arcade guys. We only played the game for about thirty minutes – most of which was spent trying to figure out the controls – but I wasn’t impressed. It’s a single player game, and the beginning of it (the short part that we played) entails controlling the main character as he showers and prepares for his day.

See?

OMG.

We sure did think it was funny, though.

Here’s what Boston looked like from the convention center just before sunset.

We left the convention center to find some dinner, but first we stopped at a pharmacy to buy some disposable diapers for Dash. We still use cloth diapers most of the time, but we figured that disposable diapers would be easier when traveling – especially since we came on a plane and didn’t bring a lot of luggage.

It was pretty cold in Boston, so we bundled up Dash in one of John’s sweatshirts while we were in the pharmacy. He was so cute, I couldn’t stand it!

We found a Thai restaurant across the street from the convention center for dinner. I forgot to take any pictures of the charming restaurant because Dash started fussing. Eric and I are nervous to be those parents with a crying baby in public, so we tend to get stressed out when this happens – which is still not very often, thankfully.

To get Dash to be quiet, I ended up nursing him at the table using a nursing cover that I bought just before this trip in anticipation of having to feed him in public. I was self-conscious that people would see what I was doing and think that it was either indecent or unsanitary. But nobody seemed to notice, and by the end of our vacation, I was whipping out my boobs (under the nursing cover, of course) to feed Dash anytime and anywhere.

At one point during dinner that first night, I also carried Dash to the bathroom to change his diaper. I could have tried changing his diaper while he was in his stroller, which reclines to a horizontal position, but I thought that the other patrons wouldn’t care to see a naked baby while they ate their dinner, nor would they want to smell baby poop if it was that kind of dirty diaper.

But there wasn’t a changing table in the bathroom, and the floor – my second option – looked nasty. I laid Dash on the counter next to the sink, but it didn’t necessarily look any cleaner. It turns out that I laid Dash in a puddle of water that I didn’t discover until I picked him up. What I learned from this experience and others like it by the end of the weekend was that it’s easier – and most likely, cleaner – to just change Dash’s diaper quickly and discreetly in his stroller.

So, Dash’s short bout of crying in the restaurant wasn’t that bad (it never is), and we made our way back to the convention center after dinner. Dash was being cute again, so I remembered to take more pictures. It’s easy to forget that Dash is capable of being a butt head when he’s being happy and cute.

While a lot of people were queuing (a consistent theme for the convention) for the night’s concerts with MC Frontalot headlining, we chose to wait in a shorter line for the PC free play room. We knew that the concert would probably be too loud for Dash, and we wouldn’t be able to stay until the end of the concert because the last train back to John’s apartment left before the concert was scheduled to end. We watched Eric play Desktop Tower Defense on the DS while we waited.

Here’s a couple pictures of the long lines. The concert line was on the against the wall on the left side of this hallway, and the PC free play line was against the wall on the right. There was a narrow walkway down the middle. Navigating with a stroller was a little difficult, but only because we didn’t want to inconvenience anybody else. We weren’t the only people there with a baby, though… and most people were polite and respectful. In fact, Dash was quite the center of attention. A group of girls actually asked to have their picture taken with Dash while we were waiting in one of the lines.

Well, we did get kicked out of the expo hall because of the stroller. They said that it was a hazard in the case of fire. I didn’t see how our stroller was any more cumbersome than wheelchairs, and they weren’t kicking out the handicaps – and I didn’t see how the expo hall was any different than the rest of the convention center, but the stroller was allowed everywhere else. But we aren’t the type to complain, so we took turns waiting in the hallway with Dash while the other checked out the exhibitors.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long to get into the PC free play room. It was HUGE. John and I played a few rounds of Left 4 Dead. Eric spectated for a few minutes, then he left the room to tend to Dash. His departure ended up being good timing because our friend from northern Virginia had just arrived from the train station. John and I finished our game, then we left to greet Chris.

We found a quiet place in a less traveled hallway, and settled in a group on the floor to dig through our swag bags and read the descriptions on our new Magic cards. Eric played Magic years before I met him, and he got me into it when I was in college… but several years had passed since we last played. We even sold most of Eric’s Magic cards on eBay a few years ago. Well, we convinced John and Chris to buy a few booster packs with us, and we spent most of our free time during PAX playing Magic with each other in the hallways.

We hung out in the convention center as long as we could, but we had to leave in time to catch the last train to Jamaica Plain. On our way out, we peeked our heads into the main theater where the concerts were being held.

I admit that I was anxious to depart from my routine, sleep in a different bed, and travel with a baby. I didn’t know what I would have done if Dash was incurably crying on the plane, or if the convention was not amenable to babies. The unknown is what scared me the most. I could anticipate everything that might go wrong, but I didn’t know how I would respond if something did go wrong. But after a full day away from home, not only had my anxiety disappeared, I was thriving on the excitement of the unknown.

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