Misha Collins Dinner Cruise: Van Con 2012 #VanCon
We arrived at the pick up location and we were the first ones there. A few seconds later we were joined by two girls from Tumblr who we quickly discovered were Destiel fans (one of their screen names is GayPurgatorySex so... YES! MY PEOPLE). Then Sockiah showed up who, like, is friends with most of my twitter friends, but for some reason I just never friended her which is a damn shame because I'm totes crushin' on her now. There was a lot of lurking before getting on the bus. Apparently there were supposed to be two buses, but there was only one so it had to do two trips and we were on the first one, which ended up being an amazing bit of luck in the long run.
When we got there we boarded the boat and walked out the bow and THERE WAS MOTHERFUCKING MISHA COLLINS. I was NOT expecting him to already be there. We were at the front of the herd and I got some amazing pictures.
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I took about 80 pictures, about 30 of which I deemed good enought to post on Tumblr. This is just the tip of the iceburg, but there are A LOT of pictures so I wanted just post what I considered "the best."
Whenever he looked at me I just sort of muttered "hi" awkwardly. He responded back with a short "hi" a couple times and I resigned myself to just shutting up there and taking pictures.
Then he made his way through the crowd and I thought for sure my moment to interact with him on a personal level was gone. Damn, was I wrong.
We went inside and he got himself a drink and walked directly up to me and wallmakerrelict and asked how we were doing.
"I think I'm having a mild heart attack," I said.
"That's ok. I think there's a defibulator onboard," he responded. That joke put me at ease pretty quickly. Thanks Mish.
I then expanded on the thank yous that I'd been giving him at every opportunity. I said that because of him I'd met a lot of amazing people who helped me through a really difficult year. I thanked him for inspiring kidness in so many people.
He said, "no, they're just great people. But, I mean, if you want to give me the credit I'll take it."
I told him that I'd told him a similar thing at BurCon and that his "2012 is going to be amazing" autograph was giving me a lot of encouragement to keep going. Then he asked me if this year was actually better. I said yeah, I had a full time job, a roof over my head, and friends, many of whom were thanks to him. I pointed at wallmakerrelict and told him that she messaged me on LiveJournal because we were both Cas fans and both lived in Portland and without him I never would have met her.
Then he started talking about how Portland is a lovely city and he asked us if we'd ever been to Powell's. I laughed and told him that's where wallmakerrelict and I first decided to meet each other in person. I told him that 7 stories of books is like heaven to me and he said it spread across several city blocks so clearly he knows his shit because THAT IS SO TRUE. MISHA COLLINS HAS BEEN TO MY FAVORITE BOOK STORE. SJFOKSDHGIODSJ:DKLFSHlf
I realized I had been monopolizing the conversation and I asked wallakerrelict if she had anything to say. She said all she wanted to ask was about Cas in season 8, but he wasn't going to tell us anything. He said that was true and I said "but you're staying in Vancouver for a while, so you'll be in season 8 more than season 7, right?" And he said yeah and I said "that's good." And he's like "maybe" and he had this coy face at us. I told him that his expression wasn't very encouraging and he said that was kind of the point.
At that point he wandered away and I decided I'd had my moment and there were several dozen other people that wanted to talk to him and I needed to just, lol, uh, let go of the Mish. We hung around close by for a while and I got a picture with him, but that was pretty much that.
I went upstairs and had dinner and started to drink beer and just enjoy myself for the rest of the evening. We hung out with squeemonster, mfluder42, sockiah, and ingenue_meg for a while on the bow of the boat while Misha made the rounds. Apparently squeemonster agrees that Misha's beard was soft, not prickly, which means I was outnumbered 2:1 in the "what texture is his beard" debate. DAMMIT.
We pretty much had the best seat on the boat to enjoy the view and since we'd all met Misha we could actually just relax and take it all in. The views were amazing.
At one point when I went back for my third beer (lol) I ran into the aforementioned Tumblr girls and we took them out on the bow of the boat with us. We started loudly and drunkenly talking about slash which OOPS probably not appropriate, but eventually the five of us had the bow to ourselves (lol oops) and we started just talking from our hearts about... well.... that'll just remain for those of us who were there to know about. These girls were amazeballs and touchy feely drunks and it was spectacular. Cheers to you, ladies!
We made our way back into the boat after it docked and Misha finally came back downstairs. Everyone seemed to be saying their good byes to him so we approached him and Wallmakerrelict said that we needed to settle a debate. She thought his beard was soft and I thought it was prickly. He invited us to try again and apparently I was "going against the grain" so he took my hand and rubbed it on his face in the "right" direction and yes Ok HIS BEARD IS SOFT. I ADMIT DEFEAT.
I then pointed to the three Tumblr girls I met and said that it was another example of how being a fan of his has led me to awesome people. He said, "yes, I'd planned that." I was pretty tipsy again so I just said "thank you thank you thank you" over and over again as we left. He somehow made it to the bar before us and as we passed I touched his back (back, not butt, I was good) and said thank you again as we exited the boat.
This cruise was, to put it simply, AMAZING. I'd hae traveled to Vancouver just for that, dammit. I seriously might do Vancon next year just for the Misha Cruise. I'd trying to save money and only go to Comic Con next summer, but this experience was so spectacular I'm not sure how I'll be able to pass up doing it again. We'll see how it goes, I suppose.
And just as an FYI: wallmakerrelict drove all night from Vancouver to Portland after this cruise. We got back into town around 6:00am. I'm exhausted, but I really wanted to share this encounter because it was AWESOME.