Wonderful idea, as long as it's in Oregon or Washington :-).
Seriously, not to cast aspersions, but these things can get expensive,
what with plane fare and all. I'd ask a travel agent what seasons are
best for rates on airfare, and we could book a few rooms in a Motel 6 or
something (I call for the Embassy Suites out here in Beaverton :-) I can
see it, along with most of the southwestern part of the Tualitan Valley
out my back window :-).
I suppose the most important question to ask is, how many of you would
be willing to pay something like:
Round Trip Air Fare $300.00
Lodging (3 nights @ $50) 150.00
Food (3 days @ $25) 75.00
Miscellaneous 50.00
-------
$575.00
And that doesn't include the trips to Mt. St. Helens, the Pacific
Ocean, Beer, or wild gaming spending sprees at The Military Corner. As
for myself, I'd love to meet you guys, but costs can be hard on the
pocketbook.... I must note that the two "TML Lunches" I tried to throw
did not come out as well as I'd hoped.
The TML has about 205 listees, about 10-15 seem to be wildly avid gamers
silly enough to have a "convention". Throw in another 5 that are local
to the convention area and that gives us 15-20 people. Still enough to
play a lot of fun Traveller, see the local sights, and get a tour of
your host's workplace.
Some other silly ideas:
have local micro-con attendees put up two or three long distance
vistors.
spread the costs around to help reduce the airfare for those
flying in, and stay with local attending TMLer's. We should
call this the "communist TMLer's con", or "TML commie con" for
short. If half flew and half hosted/drove, the costs would come
down a little, although its still pretty pricey.
if our con is very close to DGP or GDW headquarters, we may be
able to pitch in enough to make one or more official dignataries
show up, like Marc Miller, Joe Fugate, or Gary Thomas. I'll bet
they're pretty busy people, though!
abandon our own con idea and develop a contingent of TMLer's at
an existing and preplanned Con.
James