Attendance grew dramatically over the previous year's event. This author was told that 270 people showed up for Animazement's pre-convention night on Thursday, which was around half the number of people who went to all of Animazement in the inaugural year of 1998. And as many people had gone to Animazement by Saturday morning of 2000 than had gone to all of the 1999 convention.

One measurement of success: the automatic teller machine in the lobby of the Hilton North Raleigh was drained of cash by 9 a.m. Saturday. No doubt that this was a breakthrough event for Animazement in its third year.

Clearly, Animazement is following the pattern of a small convention that becomes a large event. The convention now faces the pleasant problem of deciding whether they'll have to move to a larger facility to accomodate the crowds. The attendance grew despite several major entertainment events in Raleigh, and the lure of the ACC basketball tournament in basketball-crazy North Carolina (the championship game got a lot of attention on a TV set in the hotel lobby).

Seen in the hotel parking lot: cars with license plates from as far away as New Jersey and Alabama. Some of those plates read GOURRY, SBACON and LODOSS.

And then there was the small station wagon with these stickers side-by-side on the rear door: the Episcopal Church, Sailor Moon, a NERV parking pass (an ADV Films giveaway) and Brak from Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

Raleigh deserved some anime convention enjoyment after what the area had been through.

Six weeks before Animazement, the "Triangle" had gotten a double blow of the worst winter weather in 70 years. First came a blizzard that dropped nearly two feet of snow. A few days later came an ice storm. 

That repeated weather attack would be bad enough, but it was worse than usual for a couple of reasons. First, North Carolina doesn't expect that sort of icy weather, and second, the area has a lot of hills. Big hills that you can't climb, run up or drive over when they're slathered in ice and snow. With that combination, the high-tech center of the South was stopped in its tracks.

And six months before the convention, Hurricane Floyd had caused devastating floods in the counties east of Raleigh.

(As fate would have it, a big snowstorm hit the author's home on the convention's Saturday night, justifying the trip out of town. No fun to go home and clear the snow off your car, though.)

Not that people drive much better in warm weather. The News and Observer ran a story about a wreck on Wake Forest Road, just south of the hotel, where a taxi was rammed by a pickup truck. Two people in the taxi were hospitalized, the paper said, but the truck driver raced onto I-440 where he got out and was picked up by another truck.

Finally, the weird pattern from this event: it was the third time in the last couple of years that the author has been at a convention and watched on TV as Dale Earnhardt won a Winston Cup stock car race. There was the Daytona 500 win in 1999 during Katsucon; the Bristol race in 1999 where Earnhardt wrecked Terry Labonte to win while the author was in Toronto for the Canadian National Anime Expo; and during Animazement, Earnhardt beat Bobby Labonte by a foot at the Atlanta Motor Speedway.