stressedThursday (13th July) involved mostly being frozen to death by the most air-conditioned train known to mankind. It was a Virgin Pendolino, and the reason it was so air-conditioned was that my seat was immediately next to the shop, which contained four large fridges which were each venting large quantities of hot air into the train, and the air cooling was trying to compensate for that. However, I didn't realise this was the case until an hour away from Glasgow, by which time I'd already been frozen for four hours and it barely seemed worth moving. Also, my seat was one of the few with POWER (i.e. a plug socket), and I was busy working on a Sims 2 story.
Another point to mention about Pendolinos is they have extremely poor baggage facilities. The rack above the seats is much shorter and higher than on most trains, and the larger luggage racks for suitcases are actually not big enough for many suitcases - let alone the many large suitcases of an entire carriage of people on a long-distance service! I felt particularly guilty to be taking the trike, as even folded it took up more space than I felt was fair under the circumstances. However, with Glasgow being large and hilly, and BiCon being around "20 minutes walk" from most of the recommended eating places, I figured I'd need it for accessibility purposes - and indeed, it seems to be working well for that so far.
Thursday also involved Issues with Accessible Accommodation which led to me almost having a complete meltdown, but fortunately it got sorted out admirably by the organising people. Hooray. I met
artremis & oilrig and otterylexa, and lots of other people briefly, but was too stressed to really socialise much. Also, most of the aforementioned food places stopped serving food at 10pm, and because it took several hours to get the accommodation thing sorted, it was gone that by the time I got there. Fortunately, I found a nice Italian place where I got tomato, basil & sweetcorn fusilli with chips, and lots of carbohydrate made me a happier bunny. 