Pictures? Click here to see the entire convention pictures.

Despite what many have said about this convention, all the bad things happening to them with registration, generic event tickets, and understaffed organizers, heck I know one van of people who had it off much worse than some of you... but I'll be sure to mention all the bad luck we had on the trip and how it surprisingly paid off in the long run. I guess my Karma isn't that bad.

Well my father and sister went with me, my bags of Pokemon junk, and small number of clothing articles to meet up with Mrs. Heidi Craig, the very crazy lady who had no idea what she was getting herself into by driving jinxed Phil up to Indianapolis. We met up at McDonalds, I ate my last meal, and placed my bags into her car FORGETTING my Weird Al CD in my dad's car. I don't know about you people, but the Craig road trips always begin with "The Saga Begins". This time, it would be different. But we did scare the crap out of Vijay Seixas when we picked him up in Gainesville.

Anyhoo, I arrived at the Craig Household to meet up again with Miranda and Orion, Heidi's children. Miranda is probably a picture perfect Barbie Doll: she's polite, cute as a button, and has her own big pink plastic car. Orion reminds me of practically every other male his age: mass destruction, no survivors, and he eats big pink plastic cars for breakfast. Who knew they'd both be on a team together for the Team Play events. I sure didn't. As well as the children, I met up with Eric Craig, Heidi's step son. Now here is somebody I can relate to; Eric is my age, my relative hair color, and knows how to deal with Orion. I swear we must've been related.

One more person, other than Vijay, Ryeland, and his friends, was on our trip. How could anyone forget Heidi Craig. She's organized and judged so many Pokemon Tournaments here in Florida. And the best thing is, nobody goes away without having fun at her events. We've had so many people visit the Pokemon STS Qualifiers or the Gym Challange she ran and people are still talking about it. Heidi recalls one individual going up to a Wizards of the Coast employee at a Stadium Challange last year stating something to the fact of "You guys have absolutely no idea what you are doing organizing this Stadium Challange." The WotC official replied, "We'll so would you if you had 150+ people in attendance." The awesome person who attended Heidi's event replied, "Heidi had much more than that and she still organized a better event than this. You guys should go down there and watch her work." Other than that, Heidi is an awesome player. Just to show you some of her skills, she has consistently beat Jason K. (Ness), once at the first ECSTS and again in the Team Play Championships at this year's GenCon. She really does 0wn him and Jason's father always eats that up apparently.

So for the next two days at the Craig household, we start sorting our deck ideas out, start playtesting for all formats especially the team play format, and start loaning out cards for others to use in their decks. Blockbuster is the best way to describe Heidi's collection of cards. Almost everyone has probably borrowed one card from her. Many have never returned. She should really hand out late fees... Dark Gengar, Feraligatr, Magcargo, Crobat, Kingdra, Scizor, and many other Modified rogues were tested against one another. I assisted Orion and Miranda in construction Unlimited Decks. I think I made Orion Slowking/Sneasel. Sneasel/Furret was my Unlimited Deck, which didn't do half bad considering I have not played Unlimited since last year at Origins. Team Play was a tricky format and we we considering all types of cards other than the popular Cargo/Crobat teams. In fact, we tried Aquapolis Muk for the double status effects (Poison and Burn). However, after much testing, Muk was too slow and could not retreat for a heavy hitter. Skyridge Machamp, the one that blocks all status effects, was considered too for Team Play.

Tuesday came upon us soon, Heidi picked up the rental van, and we all started packing our suitcases with everything we needed to survive the 15 hours up. However I avoided bring aerosol whipped cream again like I did at Origins last year. The combination of that, coke, Heidi's smoking, and apparently an early morning showing of Hamtaro caused my tummy to become upset. Unfortunately my Origins badge was then ruined. I should have taken it off. It was terrible. I cried. Damn Hamtaro! ;x

Our first sign of bad luck arrived with Heidi calling the house from the Rental Car Company. A mix up between the customer service phone line and the actual rental car place made Heidi spend about two times more to go rent a van. On the phone, the lady said we could take the van out of state, but the rental car company had other agendas. Screw them. Heidi did not have to put up with that and they should've given her the other van cost free. What happened to the customer is always right? Bunch of idiots if you ask me.

Heidi arrives back home with the Ford Windstar, our pimp mobile for this trip, and we start loading the van. With everything in, except for the doughnuts we accidentally left, we took Interstate 95 to go pick up Vijay. Oh here comes more bad luck: traffic jam about twenty minutes away from Vijay. Apparently it was a very very bad collision, how many cars were involved was not clear. We do know from a kind trucker that they had to get a helicopter in there to air left the victims to the hospital. The trucker also let us borrow a screwdriver to remove our cooler's top which wouldn't open while the van's doors were closed. In addition, he even gave us directions. Who ever started the crap about truckers being mean must've never met one. He offered Heidi a brewski! She didn't take it though, since she was the only driver. We study out AAA TripTicket, which really is very useful for these kinds of situations, and we find a turn around on the highway so we could take some country roads to find Vijay. Along the way back, we watched the line of cars go back forever. We saw people picnicking in the median, some kids playing soccer, and people actually talking to strangers. It was a sight to see.

Finally we made it to Gainesville to pick up a new member of our crack headed group, Vijay. Now this was Vijay's first trip with us and we all thought he'd be scared stiff to see what kind of stunts we pull. So we planned a little surprise for him. Since we didn't have our official trip song, Heidi put in this awful song from the late sixties/early seventies. It was full of innuendos that Weird Al would love to pick at. The entire car decided to tell Vijay about our really cool song and then put it on and start singing together. If you could only see Vijay's face when it came on and we started singing. He didn't say anything for a while. Vijay was probably ready to scratch his ears off. I don't blame him.

WILL BATMAN ESCAPE FROM THE JOKERS EVIL TRICKS? WILL MOOSE AND SQUIRREL ESCAPE FROM BORIS AND NATASHA? WHAT WILL BECOME OF GOKU AND THE OTHERS? MORE COMING TOMORROW. STAY TUNED.

-GymLeaderPhil