auntiemeesh | You know you're at Dragon*Con when...

...Your hotel room looks like this:

...and there's a Delorean in the parking garage.

This is the first year I've been able to arrange my schedule so as to arrive on Thursday and so far I approve. We rolled in around three-thirty in the afternoon, got into the room, spent a bit of time getting settled in, and started making our plans for the evening. Which then got turned upside down when the dinner we were going to was canceled. We headed over to the registration line, instead, to get our badges.

Every year, if you pre-register, you get a postcard in the mail which you are told to bring with you for registration, and every year, you get up to the front of the line and they don't look at your postcard. Last year I forgot mine and worried all the way through the line, even though I was pretty sure I didn't need it.

This year they've tweaked the system a little bit. They put a barcode on the postcard and when you get up to the end of the line, you hand your card over, they scan it, print out your ID and off you go. And because we were heading over at eight in the evening on Thursday night, we spent, literally, about seven minutes all told, getting into, through and out of the registration area. Last year, on Friday afternoon, we spent about three hours. This was a vast improvement.