Final Day...
There's a particular nervousness to the last day of GenCon that the earlier days don't have. The hall is the same size, the crowd hasn't really thinned, but everything feels like it's being seen through the lens of an ending, and I always end up walking a little slower because of it. I picked up one final game as I made my last pass through the exhibit hall, not because I'd been hunting for it specifically but because it caught me at exactly the right moment, the kind of purchase that feels less like shopping and more like the hall deciding I hadn't quite finished yet.
I spent a couple more hours working the Hot Games library before it was time to go, which felt like the right way to close things out. Started the week helping people find something they'd never played, and here I was doing the same thing on the last day, which is its own small kind of symmetry. Said my goodbyes after that, the real ones, the sort you mean even though you already hope to be doing this again next year.
The drive home was bereft of company, just me and the road, and there's an adjustment period to that after a week spent constantly surrounded by people. But it was mercifully lighter on construction than the trip up had been, fewer cones, fewer confused merges, fewer people apparently discovering their turn signal for the first time. No rain, no bad traffic, just miles rolling by with plenty of time to think about the week behind me.
And now, on to BGG Fall.
By Norman, BigGame, BGG Tabletop. Photography. Philosophy. The spaces where they all live.
