ICON 43
ICON is a long-running old-school science fiction convention based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. For the past several years it's been the same weekend as Archon, which is a much larger show, so it wasn't possible to do both of them. However, this year Archon had to move a week later, which made it possible to do both.
This year's ICON was held over the weekend of October 5-7, 2018 at the Marriott in Cedar Rapids. This is a larger hotel several exits north of Zazza's, the hotel where it was held both times we went previously, over a decade ago.
Because of the distance, we'd been planning to stay at my dad's place on the way over to Cedar Rapids. However, we'd forgotten that we weren't going to go over to the con on Wednesday, mostly because it had a relatively late load-in time on Thursday, and it isn't that far from the Bloomington-Normal area to Cedar Rapids. So we ended up going over on Tuesday (in some pretty heavy rain), then staying at my dad's place on Wednesday, just visiting. It did mean I had more time for doing laundry, and I could go with Dad to do errands in Bloomington on Wednesday afternoon, not to mention having some time to spend with my dad, who's still adjusting to being a widower after fifty-two years of marriage.
On Thursday morning we carried our personal stuff back out to the van and hit the road. We made pretty good time to Cedar Rapids and checked into our hotel with time to spare. I even did a little writing on a novella while we were waiting to go over to the main hotel and load in.
We'd expected to have to wait before we could load, but we got right into the dealers' room. We were even able to switch to a location that gave us greater flexibility.
On the other hand, the logistics of load-in were somewhat difficult, with some doors that had to be struggled with. As a result, it took us a fair amount of time to get everything in, in spite of having much less merchandise than we take to the big anime and comics conventions. It didn't help that I had to work around some crates of merchandise that would only be taken to Archon the following week.
Even so, we did manage to set up a fair amount of our sales structures before we were chased out for the night. We drove back over to our hotel and relaxed for a little while before turning in for the night.
On Friday we got up in time to have the hotel's complimentary breakfast. Then we headed back to the main hotel and finished setting up. I even had time to take a bunch of empty boxes back out to the van, since space was at a premium in such a small setup. We even got finished before the dealers' room opened for business and had a little time to look around, a welcome change from the frantic scramble we have at so many conventions.
However, business was pretty slow, not surprising at a relatively small convention. In fact, it seemed that the convention was smaller than I'd been lead to believe by some people I'd talked to previously. Either it had shrunk since that year, or they'd grossly misjudged the number of people in attendance.
There wasn't much in the way of parties, so we just headed back to our hotel room to have supper. Then I tried to do some writing, but I literally fell asleep sitting up. So we decided to go ahead and turn in for the night.
On Saturday we got up and had the hotel's complimentary breakfast. Then we headed back over to the main hotel and got second breakfast in the con suite before heading down to the dealers' room to open our tables. We had a little time to look around before the doors opened.
However, sales remained stubbornly slow all day long. I had to take a break in the middle of it to go upstairs to the con suite and set up my computer in order to buy into two conventions for the first part of 2019. It was a good thing I did, because one convention's dealers' room filled in twenty minutes, and the other in a matter of hours. If we'd tried to wait until after the Icon dealers' room closed, we would've ended up shut out of them.
When the dealers' room did close, we headed upstairs to the con suite, where we had supper and did some munching while waiting for the parties to start. I pulled out my novella and tried to get a little writing done, since I wasn't sure we'd have any writing time when we got back to our hotel.
The parties were fairly decent. I got to talk to some people at the Anime Iowa party, and to get an idea of when they'd be opening their vendor application form. We also went to some personal parties and got to meet some of the local fans and talk about Iowa fannish history. By the time we'd visited all the parties, we were ready to just go back to our hotel and turn in for the night.
On Sunday we got up and had the hotel's complimentary breakfast. Then we headed over to the main hotel to get the pancakes in the con suite. After we'd had a few, we headed down to the dealers' room to get our tables open.
We did get some sales, but business remained painfully slow. After lunch I started packing the fairies, and we still weren't ready to load out at closing. It seemed to take forever to get everything out and into the van. However, it didn't help that we were getting rain -- not anything heavy, but just enough to need to keep everything tarped. I also had to work around some significant problems related to merchandise for Archon that was in our way.
After we got done, we headed back up to the con suite for the dead dog party and did a little munching. Then we returned to our hotel room, where I got a little writing done as we had our real supper with nourishing food. Then we turned in for the night, knowing we needed to be alert and rested for the drive back to Dad's place.
On Monday we carried our belongings back out to the van and got checked out of the hotel. We'd acquired some empty boxes from another t-shirt vendor, and they were proving difficult to get to fit. However, we squeezed all of them in, although one of them was a persistent nuisance all the way home, wanting to tip forward into our laps.
We also had a frightening moment when we first put in a CD and got an error message. Evidently the CD player had condensation in it and the lens was fogged up, because as we drove and warmed up everything, it finally decided to play properly again.
We got to Dad's place in good time and I carried stuff in. Since we were going to stay with him until time to head off for Archon, I could take my time about getting laundry done, as well as spending some time just visiting.
Copyright 2019 by Leigh Kimmel
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Last updated June 21, 2019.