Saturday, March 27 was Day Two of our vacation in Boston as well as Day Two of the very first PAX East. Eric and Chris woke up early to get to the convention center in time for a Settlers of Catan tournament in which Chris wanted to participate. I slept for another hour or two. After I woke up, I had a slow morning with John and his roommate, Andrea. John served coffee, potatoes, eggs, and an avocado for the three of us to eat for breakfast.

Dash fell asleep in Andrea’s arms after breakfast, and we finished our coffee while we waited for our friend Cat to arrive. Cat has been in Boston for the past two years attending graduate school, but she will be moving back to Richmond later this year!

When Cat arrived, I woke Dash from his nap with Andrea, and I bundled him in his brown hoodie with bear ears – all ready for the chilly Boston weather. Then, the four of us – John, Cat, and I, with Dash in his stroller (Andrea stayed home to study) – started walking to the convention center to meet the rest of the guys for lunch.

On our way to the train station, we stopped at John’s plot in a community garden. He and Cat checked on his plants, which were just beginning to sprout…

…while I zoomed around the garden with Dash in his stroller and took photos. Dash was characteristically cheerful.

I think that John may want to consider using pesticide in his garden, though. He seems to have a Godzilla infestation. Heh.

From there, we caught a train on the Orange Line heading downtown and hopped off at the station closest to the convention center. We still had to walk several blocks, though. John took us by the gorgeous and impressive Christian Science Center, which is where he and Cat balanced on a concrete barrier and dared each other to jump across gaps in the wall.

We met Eric and Chris in front of the convention center, then we started looking for a place to eat. We ended up on a charming street in the historic Back Bay neighborhood, and we put our names on a waiting list to eat at the cafe inside Trident Booksellers. We browsed through their books and magazines while we waited, and I bought a Charley Harper’s ABCs board book for Dash. It kept him entertained for about half an hour.

The food was definitely worth the wait. The coffee was bold and rich, the fruit was fresh and crisp, and my lemon ricotta stuffed french toast was exquisite. I have thought about this toast many times since we left Boston, and I am determined to learn how to cook it.

Starting with the photo in the top left in the collage above, that’s me, Chris, and John sitting on one side of the table. Chris, John, and Eric were all in the same grade in high school, and they all went to college together, too. Justin is the fellow in the two photos in the top right. He’s wearing a homemade hat with a patch of Virginia, and the two cities in which he has lived are marked in red. In the bottom right is a photo of Justin and Cat together. They are married, and Cat and I were in the same grade in high school – at the same high school that Chris, John, and Eric attended. We were roommates for one year during college, too. Finally, there’s my lunch in the bottom left, and that’s Eric sitting across from me wearing a Metalocalypse shirt.

After lunch, Justin and Cat left because they didn’t have tickets to PAX East. The rest of us returned to the convention center. As we expected after having missed Wil Wheaton’s keynote speech the day before, there were long lines to get into any of the discussion panels. We had already explored the Expo Hall and played a few games in the Free Play rooms, though… and we wanted to get our money’s worth, so we parked ourselves in one of the queues.

Having all come from different cities – John from Boston, Chris from northern Virginia, and Eric and I from Richmond – waiting in the queue was a great time to catch up.

We just barely made it past the cut-off point in the line to get into the room, and we even had to stand in the back. I don’t remember what discussion topic we waited in line for, and I didn’t get to find out because Dash started fussing before it even began. I sacrificed my place in the room (when I left, somebody who was still waiting in line was allowed to enter), and I took Dash to a quiet corner in another area of the convention center.

I could tell that he was tired. There are a few tell-tale clues that indicate when he needs a nap. He rubs his forehead with the back of his hand, he “cranks” his ear with his fist, and his eyelids get red and droopy. I nursed him for a few minutes, then he fell asleep in my arms. Since I couldn’t get back into the discussion panel (there was still a line of people waiting to get into the room if anybody left), I sorted my Magic cards while Dash slept.

When the discussion panel that Eric, John, and Chris were listening to ended, we moved to another hallway to play Magic. We were sitting next to another group of friends who were doing the same thing, and pretty much anywhere we went in the convention center, there were people playing some kind of game. Nobody was alone, and everybody was having fun.

A crowd had formed at a booth across the hallway from where we were sitting, and Chris said, “Hey, there’s Wil Wheaton.” It’s well known among our group of friends that I am a fan of Wil Wheaton. I read his blog, and I follow his Twitter. But I am deathly terrified of actually meeting him. I’ve heard that he’s perfectly humble and least intimidating, but how lame would it be to get a chance to talk to him and all I can think to say is, “You Are SO COOL, Man.”

So, I admired him from a distance.

But let me tell you about this one time where I almost did meet Wil Wheaton.

It was at a previous PAX in Seattle, back in 2008. I had managed to avoid meeting Wil Wheaton for the entire weekend, despite Eric’s encouragement to just get in the damn line to get his autograph or a photo already. “Oh, the line’s too long,” I would say, or, “Aww shucks, we have to go do this OTHER thing way over THERE right now.” So, the convention had ended, and Eric and I had hung back to let the crowd thin at the exit. We sat by a window for a while, and I watched Eric play a game on the DS. It was nice.

Before we left, Eric stopped by the bathroom. While he was in the bathroom and I was waiting against a wall in the hallway just outside – nobody else in sight – Wil Wheaton walks by and my heart skips a beat.

Oh Shit, That Was Wil Wheaton.

I regained my composure before Eric came out of the bathroom. On our way out of the convention center, we started talking about what we wanted to eat for dinner. Then, all of a sudden, we were on an escalator and who was in front of us but Wil Motherfucking Wheaton.

I elbowed Eric and whispered – probably loud enough that Wil heard me, “Oh My God, That’s WIL WHEATON!!!” I should have kept my mouth shut because Eric’s first inclination is to try pushing me down to escalator to say hi. Thankfully, Wil got on his cell phone at that exact second. “Oh darn, I can’t say Hi now because he’s on the phone!” Hah hah.

What’s worse is that we just happened to be going the same direction as Wil once we exited the convention center. He probably thought that we were following him, and we did consider that he was only pretending to be talking on his cell phone to avoid meeting yet another fan.

This probably ranks in my top five scary moments – the other four being serious life-threatening, mentally-traumatizing affairs including drifting at sea while watching the sailboat get farther and farther away, camping under the stars in a frigid December to watch a meteor shower, inner-tubing on the James River at midnight during a thunderstorm, and getting lost in Japan while drunk.

So anyway, back to Pax East 2010. Just like the night before, we stayed at the convention center as long as we could and played Magic. We even gave Dash some of our token cards and rule cards to play with. He thought that they were yummy.

Eventually, we did have to leave so that we didn’t miss the last train back to John’s apartment. But we hadn’t eaten dinner yet, so we found a dim hole-in-the-wall pizza restaurant and ordered a pizza to go. We were so hungry that we ate half of it in the restaurant before leaving, though. It was the perfect comfort food to conclude another exhausting day of living out a backpack.

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