Due to the fireworks show all over downtown Long 
Beach, the entire area was packed with cars and 
families seeking a spot to watch the fireworks.  
Cars were double-parked, even triple-parked 
sometimes.  An unassigned parking spot, legal or 
not, was nowhere to be found.

What that meant was that folks like me couldn't 
find parking near the cel meeting location, and 
that resulted in me not taking any of my cels to 
that panel.  My friend (another fellow cel 
collector) and I had 2 boxes of about 12-14 cel 
books along with 2 oversized cel books all ready 
to share... but it's just not worth it to carry 
them a few blocks to a one-hour meeting.

So I think only those stationed at the Hyatt (the 
hotel adjacent to the convention hall) and/or 
already having their cels at the convention 
center (dealers) were actually able to take the 
majority of their collections to the panel.

Could be me, but it also seemed that the panel 
was a lot smaller than last year's panel.  A lot 
of faces I wanted to meet again did not show up, 
which was sort of a let-down.  It may be that 
logistics problem again or some other reasons as 
well.

I was still able to meet a few folks that I 
previously only knew online, so that's always 
cool.  But panel definitely didn't seem to be 
running at full strength.