On this trip, just to confound whoever's searching my suitcase in the name of National Security!, I've brought my prized Q*Bert arcade game marquee. Q*Bert programmer Warren Davis will be one of five programmers, along with Franz Lanzinger, Tim (Warrior, Reactor, Star Castle) Skelly, Ed (Battlezone) Rotberg, and fellow Atari alumnus Karl Anderson, who shows us never-before-seen footage from an unreleased Atari Formula 1 laserdisc racing game. Ed Rotberg talks a bit about the Bradley Trainer he did at Atari under a U.S. Army contract, including that, in light of that simulator, the Bradley's heavy use in the recent Iraq war makes him uneasy. Tim Skelly talked about walking into possibly the worst job situation ever at arcade game maker Cinematronics, which had just been left high and dry by top employee and Vectorbeam creator Larry Rosenthal - who left in a huff and took all documentation of the Vectorbeam technology with him. Franz Lanzinger is justifiably proud of Crystal Castles, and I talked with him after the show about getting a Nyko PS1 trakball for the sole purpose of doing Castles and Marble Madness justice in the Atari retro collections - have you noticed how much time Franz and I spent discussing Playstation modifications and specialty controllers? It was a hoot. I missed Ed Rotberg's exit, but got signatures from Warren Davis, Tim Skelly and Franz - but Davis's signature wound up not in my Expo program, but in silver paint pen on my Q*Bert marquee. Cool! And I thought it was a really unique thing to do until I saw two other guys with their Q*Bert marquees.

Next up is the swap meet, though it's savagely curtailed by the demands of the auction, which contains a lot of items; the swap meet is sliced in half and the auction begins early, and in the end the only actual swapping I accomplish is after the auction! The CGE Auction is the swap meet in all caps. It's where the big items are sold and the big dogs show up to bid on them - it's like they're selling all the games to just one dog, and it's a really big dog! I was interested in just witnessing the spectacle until a fellow Retrogaming Roundtable forum member who wasn't going to CGE asked me to bid on his behalf on a certain SNES game. But first, I have my own item to auction off: after much soul-searching and realizing that I barely have enough money to make it out of Las Vegas with a full stomach, I decide to put my newly-autographed Q*Bert marquee up for grabs. I am pleasantly surprised when it nets $90 - I would've been happy with anything for it, honestly, and I've only given it a starting bid of $30 - the amount I originally paid for it three years ago.

Three years of being on display in my gameroom - no, not just on display, being a centerpiece and a fond memento. The first marquee I ever bought, back in happier and more solvent days. Do I really want to part with it? I kinda have to at this point - I look at it this way: it's a form of raising additional money that I can live with, as opposed to taking random chances with one of the slot machines on the first floor.

A couple of items later comes the SNES game I'm bidding on for someone else. He's e-mailed me to let me know that he's willing to go up to $300 on it, which strikes me as crazy money - but the auction itself turns out to be a humdinger, bid after bid after bid. After John Hardie keeps rattling off a number ten dollars higher than the last one for a while, the other bidder verbally jumps it up to $200. Fine - I keep raising my hand without saying a word. The bidding reaches $300 in short order - but that's as far as I've been instructed to go. The bitch of it is, the game only went for $20 more than that. Ouch - but I wasn't about to commit someone to $50 to $100 more than what they had set aside for it (hey, it would piss me off if the roles were reversed and my proxy bidder did that). At the same time, I have to admit a certain thrill of being the center of attention like that (and just my style too, not saying a word). You can look at the other guy and give 'em dirty looks if you like - not to say that I did - and everyone else just sharply sucks in their breath while you calmly drive it up another hundred bucks. Naturally, as is traditional at the CGE auction, a young fellow named Marty bids amazingly high on some of the more desirable items. I'm glad he wasn't fighting me on this one, I would've lost a lot quicker!

After that wild ride, I calmed down and placed fairly low bids on other items, but usually gave up after they hit $40 or so - I didn't want to wind up too short to get Howard Scott Warshaw's DVD the next day. I wound up winning nothing except the $90 from my autographed marquee. And after the first blast of high-roller bidding, I'm sure people wondered why the hell I wasn't throwing all that money [which I didn't really have] at Condor Attack for the 2600.

After the auction, Mark presents me with the DVD and the import soundtrack CD for Miyazaki's Oscar-winning Spirited Away - a bit of a belated birthday present, and high on my must-watch-soon list. Mark and Nathan Martin (a.k.a. "anotherfluke") and I then cast about for the rest of our "boarding party" for Star Trek: The Experience - turns out we're the only ones going. And good thing too, because we get there really late - just in time for the last ride of the evening. Little do I know, it'll be the Enterprise's last ride ever, thanks to me!

Star Trek: The Experience is every bit as big and impressive as people have made it out to be. The timeline and history displays are very impressive, and I'm so freaking jealous of their beautiful model of - of all things - the real-life Voyager 2 space probe. The costume and prop displays from Enterprise almost get me pumped up about that show again...almost, but not quite. The props and costumes are all incredible. After the twisty but essentially circular path up the timeline ramp, and closer to those big beautiful models of Voyager and the Enterprise-D, until we hang a sharp right down a hallway lined with costumes and props from the various alien races from the Trek universe. At the end of this hallway - appropriately enough, Borg-themed, we wait for the last shuttle ride of the evening.

It's important to point out that for this excursion, I'm hauling both my digital still camera - a Sony Mavica which barely fits my pocket - and a Sony Digital-8 camcorder on a shoulder strap. We're instructed to stow any loose items underneath our seats, but I'm getting such a geek groove on just looking around the sets that I miss one important leeeeeettle fact: the compartments for loose items are between the seats, not directly underneath them. And I don't really have time to think about it, because that's when the surprise twist of the whole thing happens, which suddenly puts us aboard the Enterprise. Now, I gotta tell you, the Enterprise sets at the attraction are some of the most incredible stuff I've ever seen. The corridor and the bridge are just perfect. We're not allowed to press buttons or get near any control panels on the bridge, but damned if it isn't tempting. Talk about getting your geek groove on.

Anyway, the Enterprise is under attack, and we've got to take a wild "turbolift" ride to the shuttle bay to evacuate, wherein begins the real ride. There's only one problem - I've failed to notice where the loose item compartments are in the shuttle, and it takes something like five minutes - five really long, embarrassing minutes - for me to find it, get my seat properly buckled (because I'm so flustered by that point that I can't figure out a simple seatbeat)...I'm sure there was time for the Klingons to kill us six or seven times over before I finally stopped holding everyone up. Fortunately, they decide that while today is a good day to die, tomorrow really fits into their plans better and so they take it easy on us! Properly buckled in and really humiliated, I brace myself for the ride. I won't go into what happens on the ride, but for some reason the motion simulation doesn't do it for me: the transporter room trick is better. As we disembark the "shuttle" and enter the lovingly-recreated Deep Space Nine promenade, we realize it's incredibly late - even most of the Experience's shops are closed aside from the general gift shop, and sadly Quark's Bar is closed for business. I apologize to my fellow Trekkers for holding up our "evacuation," but with this being a late Saturday night crowd, they seem pretty cool about it. At this point I ease up on myself a bit and realize that it was all incredibly funny in a Seinfeldish sort of way. Hilarious, really - I mean, of all people for that to happen to...me? Mr. Star Trek LogBook? I get a pretty good chuckle out of it. And resolve, with Mark, to come back tomorrow minus the excess gear and do it properly.

We return to the 21st century, and by this point, as we say in my neck of the woods, my dogs are howlin'. Time to get off my feet and get into my room.