As promised here's more of my Shore Leave report.

After a full night of sleep in a comfy Marriott bed we headed out Friday morning for the Smithsonian annex at Dulles Airport. Inside they house the original space shuttle Enterprise, an SST, the Enola Gay and piles of other full size pieces of aerospace history.

The morning there was fun; getting back wasn't. One little turn onto the wrong highway had us lost and ending up in Chevy Chase, MD adding an hour onto our excursion. This also threw us off of my planned stop at John Eaton Elementary School in DC. We probably could have done it but once we hit the beltway we were stuck in a bumper to bumper traffic due to a sinkhole on the Baltimore Washington Parkway. Lucky me, knowing the area, gets to be the one to drive in that traffic. At least it was while driving the Hemi, so it wasn't all bad. My friends, of course, are never going to let me forget I was the one driving while we got lost.

When we returned to the hotel the convention had started up. We registered and went looking for Lisa Stuckey and her friends from upstate New York. We checked with con registration and they had picked up their memberships so we headed to the front desk to see if they were in their rooms. The desk clerk said to me, "I have her as a no-show for yesterday. She doesn't have a room here." After that, everything was a red-hot blur. The major problem, other than my friend had been shut out of a room, was that my debit card was going to be charged a full room night for what they considered a "no-show". The shocked look from my travel companions as I peppered the lobby with language which would make a sailor blush. Ah, the joy of having a tight budget! Oh, and did I mention the nice brass trash can near the elevator with the indentation of my foot as I tried to punt it across the hallway? My friend Jim calmed me down and we returned to play good cop/bad cop. Actually, it was mostly Jim doing all the reasoning and talking and me standing there looking like Charlie Manson ready to pounce. We did get them to reverse the charge but Lisa and her friends still ended up 20 minuets away from the hotel and spending more money than planned.

Across the street from the hotel in what used to be the Hunt Valley Mall is now an open air market place of about a dozen high scale stores and restaurants; perfect for dinner. The first one we tried was Noodles and Company. Superb and CHEAP! For $5 you get a heaping pile of pasta; John and I had a spicy oriental dish. Afterwards we went to see "Fantastic 4". I'll review it in another blog other than to say it was great; don't listen to the critics.

Saturday was when the bulk of the events happened. I started off by commissioning the chapter USS Top Gun at the Starfleet meeting. I had been corralled into playing a practical joke on the new CO. The night before I went into the Starfleet database and removed the majority of the crew to another chapter. Unless you’re in SFI, this doesn’t sound very funny, but trust me…it was great. There are regulations as to the number of members a chapter has to have to be commissioned and it can mean all kinds of headaches if a chapter falls beneath a minimum. Add to that a rocky history for this chapter and a CO who seems a perfect target for practical jokes and I’m right there.

There was really only one guest I wanted to meet this year and it turned out to be something of a disappointment. I had watched William Windom in “My World and Welcome To It” before I remember watching Star Trek. I can remember my father and I would watch it together and laughing at the veiled story about James Thurber. Now, he’s a very old 83 year old man with a mind which is slowly leaving. He had recently done a Trek fan film but doesn’t even remember doing it. It was nice to tell him how much the show had meant to me and to shake his hand. Meeting him like that made me value my friendship with George Takei all that much more.

As mentioned in an earlier post; there is the tradition at Shore Leave of calling someone who had to stay home from the hotel. The other is showing up unannounced when everyone expects that you couldn’t make it. This year, my friend Bill managed to do both. Saturday afternoon Jim tells me he had a message from Bismo saying he was “in a bar watching the Red Sox game and suggested I go to the Paddock and we could watch together”. Could he mean that he was actually downstairs waiting for me? I had to find out and sure enough, there he was. The bastard! It made the weekend complete.

I have to admit, I did the same kind of thing back in ’94, so I understand how much fun it can be to pull this on other people.

I have said before that one of the best perks of being a high muckey-muck in Starfleet is that people will buy me lots of alcohol and this was true again this weekend. Between settling a Superbowl bet with my friend Ann and other friends from the local area I didn’t spend a penny on drinks that night and did get myself very “relaxed”.

I surprised John with a beautiful ghost busters hockey jersey for his birthday. You would have thought I’d given him the keys to a Jaguar. He loved it! The past few years the trip itself was his “gift” so it was even better to be able to actually give him something that special to him.

I had the chance to meet up with author Peter David and fill him in on the fundraising we did for a teacher in Florida he had hooked us up with. Peter had posted on his blog about this teacher who was planning a course on comic books. Our chapter raised $100 for him thought a yard sale. Peter seemed grateful for not only being a regular reader of his blog but that what he had out there ended up helping someone.

The Masquerade is always a highlight to the weekend. Even though this years was slightly lame it was still better than we usually see at a Vulkon. The killers of the evening were “Spongborg Cubepants”; a Borg-ified Spongebob and “Sporkman”; a superhero with sporks for hands and a giant spork for a mask sporting a 2 foot tall handle sticking up over his head. It had to be seen to really appreciate. Peter David’s family won Best in Show with a collection of Johnny Depp characters singing “In the Navy”. Again, you really had to be there; but it was cool.

I’ll follow up tomorrow with Sunday’s activities and the ride home. I know there are no really rules for the length of a post, but I feel as if I’m running off at the mouth.