Um, no man or woman needs to go there

A little backstory: T grew up in Iowa, not far from a town called Riverside that has dubbed itself the "future birthplace of James T. Kirk." Yeah, like from Star Trek. Long story short, once a year they have a festival called Trek Fest. T claims that he's attended before, and that the highlight of the festival is the demolition derby, where you can "see guys dressed as Klingons and rednecks in the same place while watching cars smash into each other!"

I've never been to any kind of sci-fi or comic book convention, but I find the idea of it appealing, mostly because I think the people-watching end of it would be highly entertaining. So after years of listening to his hype about this place, it so happened that we're going to be in Iowa when this year's Trek Fest was happening. Unfortunately, we arrived too late to catch the demolition derby, but we thought it might be a kick to check it out the next night anyways. This year's fest was supposed to feature a visit from Walter Koenig, better known as Checkov! Exciting...I guess.

Well, my first tipoff that it was going to suck should have been when both T's brother and sister refused to come along. They were like, "Really? Why do you want to go there?" After some cajoling (as well as more jokes about Klingons from T), we finally convinced them to come. His sister was suckered in by the promise of a funnel cake, and his brother mainly just wanted to see the looks of disappointment on our faces once we saw how sucky it was. And boy, was it sucky.

Even by small-town carnival/festival standards, it was sad. I'll chalk some of it to the time of day we arrived (around 8pm), but there were hardly any people there: no one riding the rides, and maybe a dozen people tops near the mainstage, where they were charging $5 to get close enough to watch some anemic rock band perform. I had my camera and really wanted to take pictures, but quite frankly, I was intimidated. My sister-in-law and I split a funnel cake and a friend Snickers bar and then we all got the hell out of there. There's a river casino nearby, so we all went to check that out instead. We didn't stay there long either, but on our way out, we caught sight of a hand-painted sign for the Trek Fest that caused T to make a dramatic U-turn and pull over so he could get out and take a picture. Of course, I don't have my camera download cable with me, and there's no way a description could do the sign justice, so you'll have to bear with me till I get home. Let's just say, it was completely ridiculous and apropos of the situation.