So have you recovered from my day 1 post yet?  If you haven’t read it you can click here to catch up.

Day 1 was a lot of fun, but day 2 was pretty amazing.  So hold on to your socks because we are diving straight in.

*As per the other posts, if you’d like a picture just let me know I am pretty easy going and won’t deny you anything.

Day 2 dawned bright and sunny and oh so optimistic.  I have to add here that it is pretty awesome to be able to walk to be able to order a breakfast sandwich made fresh at the corner bodega before heading to the subway.  Oh how I miss you bodegas! … But I digress. We headed into the city pretty early (breakfast in hand!), hoping to get in and ready for our 11 AM photo op with Stan Lee.

Getting in on Saturday was a LOT easier than getting in Friday.  To their credit the organizers of Comic Con did send out apologies for thecraziness on Friday evening via their social media platforms – well done Reed Pop!  Having the lay of the land we knew that we had to go downstairs for photo ops.  We found our lane and waited … and waited … and waited.  You do a LOT of waiting on lines at these things, so if that’s not for you then you really shouldn’t go.  On the upside, you meet really great people on these lines.  Anywho, the drill sergeant who was managing the line – and I don’t mean that literally, the man sounded like a drill sergeant, with the acoustics in the Javits it was IMPOSSIBLE to understand him LOL, but he got the line moving swiftly and I do mean SWIFTLY.

Photo ops are great, you have an incredible souvenir of the moment, but you don’t spend a heck of a lot of time with the person.  You literally are herded like cattle through a curtained area, you jump into the spot (manage a hello if you’re lucky) smile, snap and OUT!  If you want a more intimate one on one exchange I suggest the autograph sessions.  They’re quick too, but sometimes you can spend more than 30 seconds with the person.

Anyways, Stan Lee was great.  We even got a smile from him, the man is one of the greats and I am honored to have even been in his presence.  Stan is retiring from going to cons so it was truly a one in a lifetime moment.  After Stan, we wandered around for a bit, I texted my cousin who I was planning on meeting up with to let her know I was around and would contact her after my Tom Mison photo op so we could at least say we saw each other LOL.

Then it was time to line up for Tom Mison (Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow)- it was the one photo op I was going to do by myself .  If you’ve read my blog, you’ll have seen that he was the inspiration for Gideon in my short in the Time Out of Darkness anthology I did.  For more information about that book click here.

That means that I was extremely nervous, it’s not every day that you get to meet the embodiment of one of your heroes, but here I was getting herded into the pen.  I’m not going to even try to say I was cool.  I completely geeked out, and was a mess.  I will say he is TALL and OMG is he ever so handsome and his eyes are just an amazing shade of blue … yes all that ran through my head as I approached to stand next to him. I should have said let’s do something fun, or can you hug me, or hey I wrote a story in an anthology and you’re the hero … anything but hi and a giggle – you see, when I got to him, he smiled and in his oh so perfectly accented voice said: “It’s lovely to meet you”.  Yup, that’s all it took for my usually pretty good brain to completely shut down.  I think I managed a pretty dorky smile, and click!  Then it was over.  Charina was dying with laughter, but I was pretty happy.

Everything after that is pretty much a haze LOL.  However, while on line Charina decided we should get a photo op with Graham McTavish – he was such a sweetheart the day before, how could we not?  So, we headed over to the area to pay for that op and we waited.  In the meantime, we headed up to the exhibition area to look around again and so I could have a definite place to meet my cousin Erica.  In the meantime we got Starbucks (which we did A LOT).  The floor was CROWDED, SO SO CROWDED.  It was really difficult to really stop to look at the booths because of the sheer number of people around.  It was cray, cray.

We made our way to the rear of the floor as we were looking for a friend of Charina’s and then stopped DEAD in our tracks as we spotted someone I had NO IDEA was going to be there.  Manu Bennett!  Manu played Crixus on Spartacus (which is where I saw him originally), but he was also on Arrow as Deathstroke, he is currently on the Shannara Chronicles on MTV, but the other reason we were so excited to see him is that he was Azog in the Hobbit Movies LOL!  It was a Hobbit kind of weekend!  We circled around a couple of times before deciding that we would get photos and autographs.  By the time we managed to get ourselves together, there was no one on his line so we walked right up and got to spend about 10 minutes with him.  He was so nice (am I repeating myself?) no seriously, he was really REALLY nice.  We spoke about New York, the Bronx in particular, and hipsters LOL.  He seemed genuinely interested.  And do you want to talk accents?  OOOOOH he’s from New Zealand so yummm.  We got our selfies (he took them and they came out great – not bad and very affordable) then it was time to meet up with my cousin.

It’s always great to see family, I come from a verrrrry tight-knit family, and who knew we were all geeks?  LOL.  Spent a few minutes with her and her husband, they had a limited time to do everything because she won tickets to what was probably the MUST SEE panel of the con – The Walking Dead.  Speaking of panels, I was supposed to meet up with a friend, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.  She managed to get to a few panels, but that meant she was parked on lines for obscene amounts of time LOL.  Sorry Rhiannon, maybe next time!

Fresh from our meet and greet with Manu (I’ve seen him naked) Bennett, we headed back downstairs for our photo op with Graham McTavish.  Whom, you may have remembered, we met on Friday.  Now, we were pretty cool headed as we waited on the cattle line, because we met him already, but wow we did not expect that he was so freaking tall.  I don’t think he remembered us, but when we stepped in for our photo he wrapped his arms around us and squeezed.  What a fantastic feeling to have someone feel as if he was just genuinely happy to have you there.  I cannot say how fantastic he was.

We decided to grab a bite after that, we had a little time before we had our final photo-op with the one and only Carrie Fisher.  Good thing we did because once we hit the line for her we waited and waited and waited.  Her photo groups were MASSIVE, but it was fun to see all the people dressed up, especially two little girls (sisters, I believe) who were dressed as Queen Amidala and A New Hope Leia.  I would have gotten a picture, but I’m always a little wary of taking pictures of strangers children with the purpose of putting them on the internet.  So you’ll just have to trust me when I say they were ADORABLE.  The dad was telling Amidala that when they met Carrie Fisher she had to tell her that “I’m your mom”, it was the cutest thing EVAH!!  We also saw a guy dressed as Han with angel wings LOL.  If you have to wait, people watching is probably the most fun you’ll have.

As we waited I wondered if Carrie, would be there with her dog Gary.  I was following twitter while they were filming both episode 7 and 8 and Gary Fisher was a hit among the cast members and I think he was at San Diego Comic Con as well. The most hilarious thing that happened though was we were told as we got to the veiled entrance that one person would get hugged and the others would stand behind her so we needed to choose who.  The ONLY logical choice was to have Charina’s son get hugged, because we knew he would FREAK OUT and he did LOL.  It was great, we made his dream come true and guess what?  Gary was there and he was in the photo too!

Once that was over we walked around a bit, but I think the excitement was catching up to us so we headed back to Starbucks to end our day and do more people watching.  It was the perfect way to end our second day at comic con.

I truly cannot wait to do it again, hopefully next year we can get our 3 day passes.  I want to give my sincerest thanks to Reed Pop for putting on a great event, to the volunteers who kept everything running smoothly and who looked like they were having a good time as well and especially to the talented actors who gave their time for us as well.

Until Next Time,