The Saint Louis Ricochet Meetup, October 3-6

A handful of us had a splendid Saint Louis Ricochet Meetup the first weekend of October. This started out with LC and myself saying that, one day, we need to go to a science fiction convention together. We live far from one another, and Saint Louis is about halfway between, so when I saw that Archon was going to have Bob Eggleton as one of its guests, I thought this would be the convention. There were some other Ricochetti who were going to join us, but due to Hurricane Helene or other reasons had to drop out. But we did have @LidensCheng, @OmegaPaladin, and @KatieKoppelman, along with some non-Ricochet companions.

My wife and I went to the Saint Louis Art Museum as soon as we got to town on Thursday afternoon. It is a nice museum, but unfortunately, none of the other Ricochetti got there until after closing time. They did get to see a handful of outdoor sculptures. Next stop was the Chuck Berry statue, which happily turned out to be just a block from Ranoush, the restaurant where we all met for supper. If anyone is looking for good Syrian cuisine in Saint Louis, I recommend it, although Lidens’s boyfriend thought it made his pants smell funny.

Friday morning, most of us took the factory tour at Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company. It was a short tour, but interesting, and it was easily the best-smelling factory I’ve ever been in. Yes, we did buy plenty of chocolate to bring home, but not as much as we wanted. Then we stopped at Gateway Arch for a little project that you will all find out about closer to the end of the year. The navigation software in LC’s rental vehicle directed us down some pretty sketchy streets and had us parking on the slope next to the river. But it was right where we needed to be for the special project. Then the last stop before the start of the convention was at Penn Station East Coast Subs, chosen because @VicrylContessa once told me how good their buns and french fries are. She was right!

Throughout the convention, we would sometimes be going to the same program items, but usually were split up among various different programs. Among the programs I most enjoyed were the ones with Bob Eggleton talking about his art, a panel discussion of alternate history stories, and one called “Food Production and Storage in Space.” That last one sounds like a pretty dull topic, right? But it was very interesting, they could have made that one a two-hour program and wouldn’t have run out of things to talk about.

Oh yeah, Team Ricochet came in second place in the Geek Trivia contest! At the end of the regular rounds we were tied for first place, so they had a sudden death round where the host asked a couple of questions that had nothing to do with geek culture at all. I don’t remember what the question was that killed us, but maybe something to do with Victorian romance literature or something like that.

I reckon I don’t need to list all of the restaurants where we had the rest of our common meals, but it was all fun from beginning to end. I think we all agree that we would like to do this convention again, maybe when they have another guest that some of us are enthused about. And for any Ricochet SF fans who regret that they missed this, you could sign up for Chattacon in January!