Hardwired for Malfunction

Local comics writer Amy Chu invited me and my friend Christina to carpool with her to a convention she was invited to in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. “Where’s that?” you may ask? It’s approximately four hours away from everywhere: New York, Cleveland, Toronto, Baltimore. The middle of nowhere is the middle of everywhere. So for us it was also about a four, five hour drive. Which is why Amy wanted to carpool for it instead of making the drive solo.

We headed out Friday afternoon, made a pit stop at the Poconos Outlets for some retail therapy and an early dinner of burgers and fried chicken from Shaquille O’Neal’s new chicken restaurant (which we noticed on our way out then had to get something to know how it was. Actually pretty good! Tender and well-seasoned chicken, melty fried cheese curds.) Then we made another stop at the Cute Little Town known as Williamsport to check out the Bullfrog Brewery. We had pierogies, which were deep fried and pretty good but not noticeably tastier than an average pierogi. The butter garlic sauce on them was nice.

I don’t like beer so I had a hot green tea and drove the last leg of the trip. The road was very dark and winding and I was very scared the whole time but we made it, finally, around 10:30.

At which point the front desk of the motel had already closed and left our keys taped up in envelopes on the door.

We went to bed relatively early because load-in and free breakfast started at 7, and we made it to the venue (the town arts center) at about... 7:15ish. The free breakfast was pretty good, being provided by an adjacent bistro instead of the 100-calorie mini-muffin packs and Red Delicious apples I was expecting. No, this had warm sticky buns and soft bagels. Tasty!

We were told doors opened at 10, but the first customers started wandering in around 9:30, while some people were still setting up. The layout was odd: exhibitors were scattered around a number of rooms near but not directly connected to each other, with me, Amy and Christina all up on the second floor. We still had decent traffic, but there wasn’t a lot of time or opportunity to go walk around and have a look at the other rooms. Some panels were outside, with a bit of a roof on the stage for the panelists but the audience chairs set up in direct August sunlight, which I’m guessing limited attendance somewhat. 

Everyone was really nice! I sold a lot of prints and stickers, but only one comic, which is the opposite of how shows usually go for me. I was really hyping up my new minicomic that Cart Press printed for me, because THEY DID AN AMAZING JOB, but no one was intrigued enough to buy it. :( I’ll put it up for sale online once I have a little more free time.

After the show we went to The Frog Hut for dinner because they served frog legs. And 24 flavors of soft serve. Everyone else Amy invited declined, so it was just the three of us. We ordered the “hoppers and poppers” (five legs and 3 jalapeno poppers), “yankee nachos” (waffle fries with cheese sauce and onions) and “chicken dippers” (basically just chicken nuggets in batter). And some milkshakes, which were: fine. The frog legs were great, juicy and perfectly cooked. Everything else was at most fine. The yankee nachos were pretty gross. 

After THAT we went to the creator meetup at a hotel bar a few blocks down. There was a different hotel with the same name we tried first, but then we ended up at our intended destination. The appetizers were tasty (and, most importantly, included what felt like my first fresh vegetable in two days), and there were two Comic Con-themed drinks: a melon-coconut Incredible Hulk, and a blue curacao-forward Plastic Man. I had a lot of fun chatting with other artists and getting to know them more after not having much of a chance to talk during the show. We wrapped it up by 10:30 because we needed to head out early Sunday morning.

Sunday at 7:30, we had a diner breakfast at a diner that’s been active since the 1930s! It’s in a real luncheonette car! It felt like a time capsule, I loved it. My ham and cheese omelette was perfectly Okay. Christina got the special mango-pear stuffed french toast and it was actually stuffed with yogurt with canned mango and pear on top. Not awful, but I liked my omelette more lol. I decided to get tea instead of coffee and then regretted this when I realized I was dozing off in the car on the way back.

We discovered that Wellsboro is closer to Baltimore than New Jersey, and also that Amy’s son in Baltimore needed groceries. So we stopped at the Costco in Harrisburg and stocked up, then drove on to Baltimore where Amy taught an online class while Christina and I went to the museums. The first museum we went to was the Homewood Museum on JHU campus, which was a very cute house where a lot of horrible things happened. The house was owned by the son of the guy who owned the most slaves in America, who was bad at business, started drinking and then abused his wife and kids so badly she got divorced from him in the mid-1800s. Bad!
But the wallpaper was so cute they had custom scarves and ties with the pattern in the gift shop.

Then we went to the Baltimore Art Museum for about fifteen minutes total, but that was enough time to see some fun art. And even more frogs!

Then we finally started driving towards home, through Delaware. We stopped at a mall in Delaware about an hour before it closed (gotta take advantage of that lack of sales tax!). I got pants at Uniqlo and Sanrio-patterned organizing tools at Miniso (on sale.) There was a Vietnamese market nearby, so we had Banh Mi for dinner. It was very good.

We reached my place at a little past 8 pm, at which point I took a shower and collapsed.

And I guess that was my weekend!