Early yesterday morning (12 March), I drove to Kansas City, Missouri. This trip to was attend KC CON, a scale modeling contest co-hosted by IPMS/Great Plains and IPMS/KC AMPS. After driving for nearly 4 hours (including a fuel stop, a stop to stretch out, and a traffic slowdown in Independence, Missouri), I arrived at the show venue, the First Church of the Nazarene.
After going through registration, I placed my sole contest entry--a 1:720 scale USS Alabama--in the Naval category. I then began to make the rounds, admiring and photographing the contest models, chatting with people I know, browsing among the vendors, and buying raffle tickets.
At Noon, I attended a pizza lunch with the other contest judges, where we had a briefing from the chief judge and received our category assignments. Our judges worked all categories except Armor That category is judged by Armor Modeling and Preservation Society (AMPS) rules, which evaluates each entry by set criteria, rather than against the competition as is the case with IPMS contests. My two teammates and I judged Mecha, Space, Science-Fiction. My model did not place in Naval.
I did buy one small kit from a vendor, won a kit and a book from the raffles, and got two kits and two magazines from the free giveaway table. I don't have any figures on attendees and entries, but it looked good in both areas to me.
After saying my goodbyes, I drove to The Blue Line, a hockey themed bar by the Kansas City Public Market just north of Downtown Kansas City. It was recommended to me by my Enterprise colleague Hannah Adams, whose fiancée's family owns the place. I had a beer at the bar--Boulevard's Unfiltered Wheat--while admiring the scene. It was crowded, but everyone was in good spirits. Several college basketball conference tournament games were on the televisions, a cover band was playing, and there was hockey memorabilia decorating the place. After the beer, I paid for it and began going home. I stopped in a Kansas City area McDonald's for dinner to go, then ate it in the car as I drove home, arriving later than night. I covered 539.9 miles (868.9 km) on the trip.
I slept well last night, despite losing one hour due to the changeover to Daylight Saving Time overnight. Today, I got my hair cut at Great Clips near South County Center, then died my hair with Just For Men. Back to work tomorrow morning.
