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August 2007 - Author's Notes Life in front of a monitor and keyboard might seem like real life, but it's not. Real life happens on the road, which is why we spend so much time there. In a Peoria motel parking lot, just before we made the final push toward AnimeIowa, we met a man who was loading his Honda Gold Wing for another trip. A Canadian, he spent more time on long road trips than most drivers spend commuting to work. Once in Kentucky, he was invited to visit another rider's home in West Virginia, so he saddled up and made the eight-hour ride. Another time, he decided he was going to head north and see what was there, so he rode in that direction – all the way to the Yukon. Our weekend trip wasn't that ambitious, but it still kept us on interstates for about 1,200 miles over four days. We commuted from home to Fort Wayne for a couple of trips to Ikasucon, then after work was finished on Saturday, we headed west for AnimeIowa, making a stop at the midpoint of the trip in East Peoria, Illinois, where we got a motel room for rest stops. Director Christopher Ayres outguessed us. Someone in Coralville had wondered where this site would go on this weekend, and he correctly figured out that we'd spend two days at Ikasucon, then head to AnimeIowa on Sunday. He wasn't surprised to see us, but others were. The trip made sense to this writer because it was possible, with the events being a not quite unseasonable distance apart. We wanted to get to both shows, and with open roads and clear weather, it was time to hit the road again. Ikasucon and AnimeIowa had their similarities – both in the Midwest, both in new convention centers after moving from location to location. We heard that Ikasucon attracted around 1,200 people and just under 2,400 were at AnimeIowa. We'll guess that the reasons why the Iowa convention outdrew the Indiana event, even though more people live in the Fort Wayne area than Coralville, are that Ikasucon moved to a location where fandom conventions are rare (even though BotCon started in Fort Wayne) and that AnimeIowa is right next to Iowa City and the big University of Iowa. It was just a coincidence that both conventions were held at state fair time – Ikasucon was about as far from the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis as AnimeIowa was to the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. Returning to the East Peoria motel after AnimeIowa, we were checking the rearview mirror in I-80 traffic when we saw it - a brilliant sunset, hued pink and salmon in the northwest Iowa sky. We were about ready to pull off the interstate at the Iowa 80 truck stop for fuel, and for a moment it seemed like it was a race between our old car and nature. The sky doesn't wait for you, and we needed to find a traffic-free viewing spot before the sun sat. Eventually, we got to the Walcott exit, drove past Iowa 80 and ducked between trucks into the parking lot of the truck stop on the other side of the road. The sunset and its bright colors lingered, and we dug out the camera. Cycling through the lenses – the wide angle glass, the fast 50mm and the image stabilizer telephoto – we got several images of the sunset, using it to frame farmhouses on the horizon. After we finished with the pictures, we realized that, to the truckers who had been moving in and out of the stop, we must have looked something between silly and threatening to be taking pictures of the sky. Then we looked back at the sunset and saw a young man and a woman, sitting on a ridge and facing the sunset, taking in the natural light show. August 2007 Main Page