28 April, 2011

Discworld convention was awesome!


Well, I had a fantastic time at the convention. There were lots of cool events ranging from Viking armour displays (yes I did get to wear a chain mail shirt, Viking helmet and brandish a sword) to more Discworld flavoured stuff like a mock trial of Lord Vetinari (for being a tyrant), plays based on Discworld characters, costume parades, games of Thud (Chickie loved this game) and much much more. I also got a book signed by Sir Terry himself (yes that's me in the photo), and after the closing ceremony I was able to get a photo of Chickie and me with Sir Terry, we also had a very quick chat.

We stayed in the hotel that is sort of attached to the convention centre, which happened to be where Terry, and his assistant Rob, also stayed. We saw him around quite a lot - breakfasting at the table next to him etc. Some friends and I had a quick chat with his assistant Rob one evening as well. They both seem like such lovely people. You can see that Terry's Alzheimers is affecting him - during his speech at the closing ceremony he seemed to lose track of what he was saying and mentioned that he has problems with short term memory loss. Quite sad to see this in one of my favourite authors.

There were quite a lot of people there but thankfully there were some cafe's and restaurants downstairs so getting some chillout time wasn't too hard.

After the convention we also went to Jenolan Caves. Talk about stunning! I have a thing for caves and the various formations, and the two caves we visited did not disappoint one bit! We saw the Lucas cave and the Temple of Baal cave. This pic is from the Lucas cave. This photo - and the others we took, have made us realise that we really need a better camera. This is a pretty basic camera and it's getting on in years too. I'm thinking a basic DSLR might be nice, but really have no idea where to start! So, a question - if you have a DSLR, what do you have and what do you like/dislike about it?

4 comments:

Dogbait said...

Wow, a blast from the past! I took you out of my feed reader hence I didn't know you were back until your comment.

Melinda said...

Gorgeous! Sounds like you had a lovely time.

Meggie said...

I too, was so happy to see you! Sounds like you had a lovely weekend.

velcro said...

hello, am really jealous that you met Terry Pratchett. I adore his books.
As for DSLR, I have a Nikon D500 which is wow 5 years old now. It was very fast at taking multiple shots one after another when we first got it but it's slowing down now. I think the only thing I didn't and still don't like about it is its size and weight. I used to feel really awkward about taking it out in public especially in South London.