To Charlotte and Back: Part 1

My trip to Charlotte was a very very interesting ordeal, as have been most of my annual trips for work. It seems that I am never very far from some outlandish, slightly unbelievable occurence, and I am glad for that because it makes these nerdy trips less boring. I left Austin on Sunday morning with very little effort. The lady at the ticket counter applauded me for reaching exactly 49lbs (1lb under the "anything over $50 gets you a service charge of $25). I made sure to let her know I was traveling for five days and needed several costume changes PER day. She laughed a bit, and then THREW my suitcase on the bag check belt. I slept until I got to New York, and when I got off the plane and walked out onto the JetBlue terminal I was horrified at what I would later find was not, in fact, a terminal under construction, but their finished product. It was very high school gym industrial...and not in a cute way at all. I arrived in Charlotte, got my rental RAV-4, btw, anyone over 6'0 tall should not drive this car because the steering wheel does not adjust high enough for long legged people. I got to my VERY posh hotel...The Westin, and got settled in. I registered at the conference, and then headed straight to the concierge (Miranda or Mandy or Matilda...can't remember) and was like..."hey girl, does this town have any cute gay bars?" I think she lost her shit for a minute or two because I was asking her a question with the word "gay" in it. She started rambling off names of bars, or what she thought were the names of the bars and looking on the internet. Now, come on, this girl was blonde tall and pretty in a southern farm girl who probably had to leave home because she got knocked up by her 2nd cousin Zeke, so I figured she would have been able to, like, totally tell me where I could go. NATCH. Then she starts to write down what she thinks the names are...misspelling each and every single name. "Scorpeoes (Scorpio), Leeyaysons (Liaisons), and" there was another but I forget the name. She highly recommended Scorpio because it was fun on Sunday night and she has been to 60% of the gay bars in Charlotte and it is the best. 60% huh? Well, that is lovely. I ended up going to Liaisons, which was not full of cute people. I had one beer, and got the hell out of there. Also, apparently you have to be a member of a club to drink in Charlotte...Mindy never mentioned this. Oh well, I went back to my room, crashed and went to the conference the next day. To be continued...