Triad Anime Con 2016 – page 2
I dunno if the hotels were still on Winter Mode and didn’t have the air conditioning turned on or what, but it was muggy as CRAP at Triad. It probably didn’t help that my personal con experience was spent entirely next to one pool or another. Our hotel room was on the same floor as one hotel’s pool, and the atrium where Artist Alley was also happened to be right in front of THAT hotel’s pool. And I kid you not, the bathrooms right next to it was DISGUSTINGLY humid. Like, huge puddles of condensation on EVERYTHING.
(Historical Notes: I don’t think I ever fully communicate just how weird the Embassy Suites in Winston-Salem felt as a convention location. It’s one of those “middle of the city” hotels where everything is stacked on top of itself, and that made the people flow very, very odd. The Dealer’s Room was down at a bottom floor below the hotel lobby, half the panels and the game room were in the Marriott next door, and artist alley was in the big mezzanine level with the hotel rooms wrapped around it. It was obviously MEANT to feel like the central hub of the whole structure, but the way so much stuff was centered elsewhere, it… just didn’t. You ever see a theme park with an empty space where a ride used to be, or a museum that just removed an exhibit, or a restaurant that used to have an indoor playground but now just has a creepy unused room? That’s what this place felt like. Plus, while I get that they never would have been able to fit all the tables in one of the other rooms, the mezzanine level was WAY too big for them to fill up. Extra space to move around is nice, but this much just left us feeling really out of place. That, and the fact that two-thirds of the foot traffic was just people passing through or cosplayers looking for an open space to take pictures. Apparently Triad moved to an actual convention center sometime after this, and I have to think it was a move up. I actually took pictures of the whole setup, but I don’t think they adequately express the oddness of how it felt.)
I still get shudders remembering the horrors of that bathroom…
The funny thing is, objectively speaking, it honestly wasn’t that DIRTY by convention standards. At least, all I can remember is the sogginess, not damage or debris. Then again, I did confess to having a LOT of gaps in my memory over this one.