After two years of essentially holing up inside my house, it feels weird to travel, and I’m suffering some serious cognitive dissonance on this trip. On the one hand, it’s a freaky step outside my COVID comfort zone (people? setting foot in buildings that aren’t my house for more than a couple of hours? madness!). On the other, it feels familiar and joyous.

From waiting at the gate to get on my outbound plane, where I came across a local(ish) Doctor Who friend, it’s felt almost like a regular Gally. The roommate situation is a little sparser than usual, but after I arrived on Wednesday, I got in my visit with my SoCal-based friend whom I only ever get to see when I come for Gally, and the Lobby already had that good ol’ LobbyCon feel.

Thursday my primary ConBuddy arrived, and as he is one of only two close friends who are attending this year (the other didn’t arrive until Friday), and there are no official con events until the opening social on Thursday evening, it was a pretty low-key day of hanging with ConBuddy in between stretches of chilling in my hotel room. We even managed the now-traditional visit to Aliki’s Greek Taverna! Then it was time for the Social.

Although the line to file into the room was ridiculously long, this year’s opening Social still felt slightly sparse. More to the point, ConBuddy didn’t get mobbed as thoroughly as he usually does as the source of commemorative coins. He got the usual mix of people who came rushing up to get the coins as quickly as they could before they ran out, others who happened on him and were pleasantly surprised to have found him for the first time, and still others who walked past with only glancing interest in whatever-is-happening-over-there.

Those first two groups are usually enough for him to have run out within a half an hour or so, but he still had nearly half the allotment for the Social left when we finally decided it was time to bail, less than an hour after the Social began. I wasn’t sure whether that was some sort of indicator for how the rest of the con would go or not.

Friday morning, we met up again well before the first panel was scheduled, to get in line for autographs. I was only looking for three this year, and two of those guests had signing sessions right off the bat. Sadly, my outlook was overly optimistic. ConBuddy and I were literally third and fourth in line for general attendees, but of course those who had shelled out extra money for special passes got to jump the queue. The line for Diamond or TARDIS Pass holders would be empty for five or ten minutes, and we’d think the general line was about to move, but just then a new Pass holder would show up. This lasted for an hour before the general admission folks finally got to start moving forward.

Eventually we got our first autographs, but there’s no way we’d get through that second line before that guest was done with the session, so we just decided it was time for lunch. We met up for the Sacha Dhawan interview panel and found seats near the back because I knew I’d have to leave early for the first panel I was on, even if I weren’t also waiting for Roommate to arrive on his much-delayed flight. With Sacha coming in a little late and Roommate’s arrival, I literally saw Sacha on stage for approximately two minutes. Oh well.

My panel, which was about looking forward to what’s coming in the near future of the show (“Expect… The Unexpected!”), went well. The moderator had a boatload of experience, and kept things moving well, getting a mix of opinions from the various panelists and the audience, who all seemed well engaged.

Then it was time for a stint in Program A, where my friends and I sat through three interview panels. The first was “The Sarah Jane Adventures: A Look Back” with Anjli Mohindra, Tommy Knight, and Gary Russell. It’s a little weird to realize how much time has passed (Tommy was 14 when he started work on the show, and he’s nearly 30 now), but thinking back on that show and how much it meant to us as fans was lovely.

The second and third panels were single-guest panels with Mandip Gill and Sylvester McCoy, respectively. Mandip has a joyful persona that is a real pleasure to experience (the sheer delight on her face when she mentioned wanting to top Barrowman’s ribbon record—which sent audience members streaming toward the stage to pile ribbons there for her—was infectious), while Sylvester McCoy is always just wonderfully over-the-top, a comic force to be reckoned with. Due to the current health situation, McCoy did not bop about in the audience himself as is his usual modus operandi, but he was still as enjoyable as ever.

After a brief break, our little group reconvened at the gameshow panel “Doctor Who Deathmatch: Monsters Edition,” run by Paul Cornell. Poor Paul was really off his game (and a group of teens next to us in the audience seemed to be having their own panel, their discussions held at effectively normal conversational volume—in other words, way too loud), but the panelists’ comments and opinions were still fun, and there didn’t seem to be any major upsets along the way. (In other words, for both categories (“best on screen” (final pairing: Daleks v. Cybermen) and “who would win in a fight” (final pairing: Daleks v. Autons)), the Daleks came out on top.)

With that, our day was suddenly done. Although we had dinner at one of the remaining food trucks (one of the three had already closed up by the time we got out to the patio), we took a cursory look around the Lobby and decided LobbyCon held zero appeal this year. So at the ripe old time of 8:30pm, we called it a night. Saturday would be another day.