The surprise ending

I popped a very cool surprise on Rebecca this past weekend....and I will do the same for all of you right now.

I've always been serious about not going to Comic-Con this year due to major issues I've covered before, making our movie location trip the big event of the summer. But when hotel rooms went up through the event organization in March and I actually (surprisingly) secured a reservation at our beloved Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel, I began to think (amongst the bitter irony of it all) that I should put that reservation in my back pocket just in case we decided to make some use of it.

Now it's time to reveal that we do, in fact, intend to take advantage of part of this lower rate accommodations happenstance. At the end of 'The Farm, The Field and The Tower' location tour, we will be heading to Comic-Con for Saturday and Sunday!

I wanted to keep what I'd secured as a surprise for Rebecca on our anniversary which was this past Saturday. She'd expressed several times a sense of yearning about not attending Comic-Con, even though she and I were extremely excited to be making our upcoming trip. We both wished it could have worked out and I truly wasn't really sure what was going to happen, unbeknownst to her.

As I began to lay out plans for our movie location event I realized that in order to fill out the entire week (which we both already had been approved for at our perspective jobs) the length of time at two of the stops would start to become a bit gratuitous. I could only ever comfortably stretch things out to Saturday, with Saturday night / Sunday becoming the inevitable 'oh yeah, Comic-Con is still going on and we're not there' always being the end game.

It occurred to me that we could take this tour AND do Saturday and Sunday of Comic-Con if we played our logistical cards right. As Rebecca's eyes widened about the possibilities once I filled her in (she definitely loved my surprise), we began to think about heading directly to San Diego from Iowa after the "Field of Dreams" baseball diamond.

So that's now the O-fficial plan: Alberta Canada, Wyoming, Iowa, San Diego! The final two days at Comic-Con will also serve as our climactic end-of-tour wrap party. Woot!

Yeah, I'm still annoyed at the bullshit the Comic-Con organization as well as the Hilton and Marriott put us through. But with a stay at our favorite hotel in hand for half the price we've paid in the past (as well as my pro-reg in place) I think we need to do this.

Surprise!