The fun thing about attending Dragon Con fan panels is you can collect ribbons from them that can be affixed to your badge to make it, like, even badgier.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In 2019 my wife Anne and I attended our very first Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. We returned home to Indianapolis with a plethora of new memories, hundreds and hundreds of photos, and a shared suspicion that we’d return someday. Not every year, but someday. In the year of our grand pandemic 2020 we attended exactly zero conventions for easily guessed reasons. In 2021 several cons made their comeback plans, but Dragon Con stepped up hardest and made us some offers we couldn’t refuse. We didn’t have to think long or hard before accepting the special rules under which this pandemic-era show would be held…

It all comes down to this: Saturday, September 4th, our final day at Dragon Con 2021 before we spent all of Sunday driving home. Well, not all of Sunday — Labor Day Eve traffic was so light and unsupervised that, after adjusting for pit stops, we made it from Atlanta to Indianapolis in less than eight hours. We actually had extra time to ourselves when we got home, which was nice. But that was the next day. This is the day.

September 4th was also the week before the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, which has no relevance here whatsoever but very nearly counts as fun trivia, except it isn’t.

We’ve covered a large chunk of our Saturday activities already. I promise this installment won’t take nearly as many words as the last one. Thanks to the amazing colossal Dragon Con app, which includes an archive of your past shows, this one was easy to organize by time stamp.

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