Did a good set of geocaches on my way to the hotel. I'm a bit familiar with cache hiding styles in Central Connecticut. Caches there are similar to caches in my usual area of travel but different enough to make things interesting. I had been forewarned about the bad part of Waterbury. I did a few geocaches there and the neighborhood doesn't look any worse than Newark or Jersey City. However, I had to wonder about people who sit in front of their rowhouses just watching traffic.
After the 12th cache, I found that I couldn't easily get to the next closest cache after that because exits on Route 8 weren't as I expected. So I went to the hotel to check in. Got a room on the first floor. Nice! After getting the keys, I headed out again and got 8 more geocaches. I did the last 4 after dark but those caches were in two park-and-rides and an I-84 rest area, so I figured it was safe to do those at night.
Went back to the hotel. Chatted with Danruk for a little while and then headed out to dinner. I used the GPS to find restaurants, with mixed results. The problem was my map data was old enough that some of the restaurants listed had already gone out of business! (Is it too much to expect a restaurant to last longer than few years? :) ) I found a Chinese takeout about 1.5 miles to the West along E. Main St. However, the people there were creepy and more intent on playing the "where are you from?" game (Why are people who ask that question never satisfied when I tell them that I'm from New Jersey?) than taking my order, so I had a buffalo chicken footlong sub at Subway, in the same strip mall, instead.
Went back to the hotel. By this time, pre-reg had started. I picked up my badge. Once again, I must have been very early because my registration number was 5. Then I hung out at the bar and chatted with Danruk, Kage, Wildwolf, and Wally Wabbit. That's the nice thing about smaller cons. You can actually meet up with and talk to people instead of rushing here and there, the way things usually go in larger cons.
Returned to my room to freshen up. It was then when I discovered that I'd forgotten to pack toothpaste. Fortunately, one of the geocaches I did in Waterbury was near a 24-hour supermarket, so all I needed to do was navigate back there.
Anne Hutchinson's Got Gas (New York)
Little Green Men: Lunch Break (Connecticut)
I 84 Danbury Bug & Coin Hotel (Connecticut)
Pooh Cache at the Largay Memorial Perserve (Connecticut)
LCP (Connecticut)
MICRO TYCO #3 (Connecticut)
MICRO TYCO #5 (Connecticut)
Poor Richard (Connecticut)
Dash-N-Cache #2 (Connecticut)
Guns of our Fathers #2 (Connecticut)
Never! (Connecticut)
All Dogs (Connecticut)
Quid Aere Perennius (Connecticut)
Hide-N-Geek (Connecticut)
Resonance (Connecticut)
Ten Ninety-Seven MC (Connecticut)
Central CT Park and Hide #2 (Connecticut)
Central CT Park and Hide #1 (Connecticut)
I-84 East Southington Traveler's T.B. Hotel (Connecticut)
Take a Break in CT (Connecticut)