Since there is just so much content to write about our trip to BotCon this year, I’m going to be splitting it up into multiple posts and maybe going into detail about specific things. So here is the first bit.

I’d say the start of the BotCon adventure began with my parents’ house being broken into the weekend before the convention. They had been out of town on a trip to Ireland and my sister, Jessica, and myself had been watching the house while they were gone. Unfortunately during one of the spans between us checking up on the home, the front door was broken into.

Nothing apparent was stolen, but it did necessitate us having to stay over at the house for several days, installing a metal security door at midnight, and travelling between their home and ours multiple times.

I suppose a good thing that happened while we were there was that Fry’s Electronics released some Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen toys early on Friday May 22. The toys weren’t officially supposed to be available until May 29th, and most places that had them on the shelves weren’t allowed them to be sold. In fact BotCon was advertising the fact they’d have these first figures available exclusively early and with special first release stickers. Not one to wait, Jessica and I headed over there after breakfast and picked up my first RotF figures: Leader Optimus Prime, Leader Megatron, Deluxe Bumblebee, and Deluxe Sideways.

So that was a nice little surprise to a fairly rough start of a weekend.

Fast forward a few days to Memorial Day and on another trip back to the folk’s house for another sleepover and the Tempe Marketplace Target decided to slip some more RotF toys early. This trip netted Deluxe Wheelie, Deluxe Chromia, Deluxe Soundwave, Gravity Bot Bumblebee, Bumble Spud, and a Robot Replica’s Optimus Prime.

So here I was just 3 days before the official start of the convention and I already had 10 toys from RotF. That would be at least 10 less ‘first release’ stickers than I planned and less I’d have to drive home with, or at least so I thought…

BotCon toy count tally to date = 10