I went to the Shore Leave Star Trek convention at the lovely Hunt Valley Marriott north of Baltimore last weekend. The occasion was the 20th anniversary of the USS Christa McAuliffe, the Star Trek club I co-founded.

Celebrating the anniversary with my friends was terrific. We had a dinner on Saturday night at a restaurant near the hotel called Padonia Station. It's a nice sports bar with good pub food. We had a separate room, and we were even welcomed on the electronic message board on the restaurant's street sign. There were 24 of us at dinner. Most of the folks had traveled down from New England, but we had folks from Maryland, Florida and California. One nice thing was that some old friends who many of us hadn't seen in years stopped by with their kids. They were the first couple who met through the McAuliffe to get married, and it was really nice to see them.

It was great hanging out with all my friends in general during the weekend. The crew of the McAuliffe is like family to me and it was wonderful to be able to spend time with so many of them and catch up with the ones I don't see very often.

That said, I think this was my last weekend trip without my family for a while.

By Saturday night, I was really missing them. I don't see much of the kids during the week and when I don't see them on the weekend, well, I don't enjoy it. I want to be able to spend time with them, at least while they still want to spend time with me. I little romantic weekend away with A. would be one thing but taking off by myself isn't going to be happening any time soon.

I also found that Shore Leave wasn't what it once was to me. I have a lot of history with this convention. I went to my first one in 1986 and I went every year except one until 1998, the year after J. came home.

It took me 5 years to get back to another one, in 2003. I went down to Baltimore and, quite honestly, I was bored by Saturday night. But I thought it was a fluke. I decided this time to attend more panels and do more "con" stuff. And I have to say that if we didn't have the McAuliffe dinner on Saturday night, I would have taken my rented Toyota Matix and headed down to RFK Stadium to catch the Nationals game. I did intend to go to the Saturday night parties and hang out with my friends, but I decided to lay down for a few minutes in the hotel room and woke up three hours later, at about 2 AM. Sunday morning I wandered around the convention, stopped at a panel, left bored 20 minutes later, ran into a few friends and headed into the Inner Harbor.

Baltimore is a great town and I know the kids would love it there. A. and I have tentatively scheduled a trip there next Memorial Day weekend. There is a ton of stuff to do just in the Inner Harbor - the National Aquarium, the Maryland Science Center, the USS Constellation, hopefully a game at Camden Yards.

I don't mean to make it sound like I was miserable all weekend. I loved being with the crew and it was great to be able to celebrate this milestone with everyone. There was some fun stuff at the con as well. Connor Trineer (Trip Tucker from Star Trek: Enterprise) gave an entertaining talk. My old friend Mojo did a great presentation about doing special effects on Battlestar Galactica. He showed the "pre-visualization" of a special effects sequence he worked on for the show, then showed the final product from the actual episode. It was really interesting to see how the whole process worked. However, I just don't think science fiction conventions are my thing at this stage of my life.