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Anime Detour - Author's Notes - 2006 Notes began while waiting for a delayed Sunday night flight home. One of the most fasinating features of the Ramada Thunderbird hotel is a carved wood map of the U.S. that lists the Indian tribes that once spanned the continent. It's a grest explanation of how the U.S. has so many Indian place names, and it's a way to demonstrate the non-white influences on America - as are the number of anime conventions that have spung up across the country. There were two big anime conventions on the same March weekend, and the author had to choose between them. We decided to head only to Anime Detour rather than Sakura Con, mssing the Seattle event for the first time in years. Our decision was based on available time. The author had to work on the conventions' Friday and needed to get back to work early Monday morning. That work schedule took away the extra time needed to get back from the West Coast, so we chose the Minnesota event. More time would have given us a chance to head west to hear Camino and see Ippongi Bang, but since the U.S. and Boeing stopped developing a supersonic transport in the 1970's, air travel isn't fast enough. Anime Detour had no Japanese guests, concentrating instead on Americans who dub anime. Those guests, from California and Texas, were enthusiastically received. The actors and directors held crowded autograph sessions on all of the event's three days. If some of the pictures from the Saturday night costume contest looked unusually dark, that's because the people operating the lights for the event had trouble getting enough light on the stage from time to time - or something like that. It wasn't until the second entry got on stage that the light crew figured out how to get light on stage from the front rather than from the back. In 2005 we brought our photo sales booth setup to Anime Detour, but we left the extra equipment at home in 2006. We just got lazy for once and decided to travel light, rather than carrying an extra 80 pounds of equipment. We confess to booking our travel plans later than usual, and had to spend Saturday night at a motel a couple of miles west of the convention hotel. It didn't make a difference, thanks in part to the remarkable performance of Gold Cab, which got a car to the Super 8 three minutes after it was called - which has to be some sort of record. The author admites to being distracted by some television sports events during the Anime Detour weekend, including the wonderfuly dramatic LSU-Texas and George Mason-Connecticut college basketball games. We also had a fresh electronic toy for the trip, the fourth notebook PC we've used for the web site. It was the least expensive new machine we could find, but performed well -- even though it came without a floppy drive or PCMCIA slots. If only our Canon Digital Rebel camera had gotten back from the place where it had been sent for a shutter replacement, some of our weekend work would have been a little easier. For those wondering about the author's health: we're doing just fine. We were able to work harder and put more effort into the Anime Detour report than at Katsucon, partially because we've lost more weight, enough to justify buying another belt to handle our diminishing waistline. Katsucon Main Page