Wes takes Erica to a video game convention, day 2

Well, technically it's days 2 & 3 but day 3 was just us driving home; not too interesting. Anyway, Day 2 of RTX went a little like this...

The guy in the top middle picture was wearing a hollowed out sexualized female body pillow. Hahaha!

       The first person we saw in the morning was Spider Man. He was a true actor in full costume and posed when I asked for a picture. After that, I decided that I, too, would be a dedicated RTX attendee. I would ask cosplayers for their pictures, play as many games as I could and even buy something as a souvenir. We did drive 6 hours to get here, gotta take it all in, right?
       We first went to the Free Play panel. This panel was a lot better than Game Attack Live!. The members of the show, Free Play, answered audience questions and ended the interview with a mini rave. We all got glow sticks! LOL After that, we headed to the main video game expo.

I think this guy paid for his pug to get into RTX just for this picture.

The small selection of vendors who weren't t-shirts or posters. Wait, why is my picture crooked?

The first game I wanted to play was Butt Sniffin' Pugs. Your character is a pug and you pair up with another pug to run around a park. You can bark at a hotdog vendor, pee, take a dump and, of course, sniff butts. The game was pretty silly. There were a lot of indie game developers at RTX. And there were some big name ones, too, like the newest edition of Halo. I wanted to play some of each but that would have to wait until the afternoon. Next we went in search of our souvenirs. We each bought a t-shirt. 

Then it was lunch time!! We ate at a creperie. I've only ever had sweet crepes so I decided to order a savory one. It was amazing. The smoked salmon was soooo good!! After lunch, it was back to the arcade at JW Marriot (my request). I played Centipede as well as some other games. I played a five-person group X-Men game. I was the weakest link but we still managed to kick some villain butt.

       We spent the rest of the afternoon at the video game expo hall. I played Song of the Deep (a new PS4 game) and Capsule Force. I didn't enjoy Capsule Force but Song of the Deep was fun. There was a ten minute play time limit. I spent seven of my ten minutes trying to navigate through a simple maze of waterfalls. I'm sure all of the gamers around me were screaming in their heads with frustration. We played a few more games but I don't remember which ones. Most of the games had a long waiting line so I didn't play as many as I would have liked.

       I took tons of pictures of costumes. My favorite was this group of girls dressed as RWBY. It's some anime that consists of four teenage girls dressed in either red, white, black or yellow. These girls' costumes looked exactly like the posters of RWBY that the vendors had for sale. (There's a small picture of them on last week's blog.) Unfortunately, we missed two of the costumes that we really wanted. We saw a girl walk by dressed as Spider Woman and a guy dressed as a character in Fallout. I couldn't catch them in time and we never saw them again. 

       There was a beef jerky vendor there (JerkyXP) and their mascot was an adorable Yorkie. He was one of the main attractions. 

Jack the CEO was so well behaved and precious. 

After a full second day of RTX, we went back to the Congress Avenue Bridge for a second night of bat viewing. This time we went to the park underneath the bridge. There were a lot of people camped out there the night before so I figured the viewing might be better there. And it was!! We saw more bats fly out and we could see them clearer because we were right there close to them. It was a long day so instead of going out to eat, we opted for pizza in the hotel room.

I wanted to take a video of the bat flight but couldn't capture it. So here's a pre-bat flight view.

The next morning, it was time to say goodbye to Austin. There was surprisingly no traffic going home. Still had construction but people were driving normally. We stopped at Texas Smokehouse somewhere between Austin and Fort Worth for some beef jerky. They had free samples so I asked for the most exotic one I could find, python jerky. It was not good. It was hard, chewy and extremely sweet. They had a varied selection but we settled on plain original beef jerky.

The world's finest gas station.

On the drive into Austin, I kept seeing billboards for Buc-ee's. It's just a gas station so I didn't know why there was a billboard advertisement every few miles. On the drive home, I decided that we needed to get gas at Buc-ee's. It was not "just a gas station." It is probably the largest gas station in existence. And the convenience store was about the size of Wal-Mart. I have never been impressed with a gas station/convenience store but now I am. Buc-ee's is a mecca for travelers. Come hungry, come needing gas, come to relieve your bowels, come for snacks, come for souvenirs...Buc-ee's has it all! They even had a mascot beaver walking around posing for pictures with the children. I'm not going to lie, Wes & I wanted a picture with Buc-ee but he walked away before we could snag him.

We had a nice two days in Austin. All of the other trips we've taken (Fabric District, visiting my relatives, Elvis wedding ceremony) were my ideas so it was nice to partake in one of Wes' adventures. I enjoyed my RTX experience, I finally got to see a bat flight (still bitter that we missed the one at Carlsbad Caverns), the food was good and our hotel was top notch. And of course, Buc-ee's. LOL