Welcome back to Feature Friday. Hope everyone who wanted to had a chance to get out and play or judge at a prerelease last weekend. As usual, I ran the Portland prerelease on Saturday. Sunday I had a symphony concert to play in, so I didn't have an opportunity to play or work. We had a turnout on the low end of our expectations for Saturday, but we more than compensated for it with the absence of several of our regular staff (through no fault of their own). I can't recall a prerelease where I've been so busy for the whole day. I ended up acting as primary scorekeeper for all of our events, as well as Head Judge.

Other than our short staffing, we had a fine event. Each event started right about the time I predicted it would. There were random playmat giveaways for each tournament, which was a big hit. I didn't get to chat as much with our regular attendees as I might have liked, but I had the sense that players enjoyed the new set and had a good time. That's all I can really ask of a prerelease.

I've got Grand Prix Vancouver on my mind now. As you may know, I'm going to be head judge; this is my first time in that role. There's not a whole lot I can share with you right now about my preparations (though I may write more about that next month), but I will say this: I'm looking forward to visiting Vancouver. It's a beautiful city, very new, relatively clean, and situated in some fantastic geography. It's on the remote side, as far as North American GPs go, but it's well worth visiting. I've probably been a half-dozen times. Other than my last trip (an unplanned overnight layover on the way home from France, as I came down with a really nasty bout of the flu), I've always had a marvelous time.

The opportunity to travel is a significant part of what makes high-level event judging as fun as it is. It takes a bit of work, though, since it's easy to end up spending all of your time on site. I want to share some of the places I've been fortunate enough to travel and the memories that have stayed with me from those visits, outside of the event hall:

• San Diego—My first Pro Tour, back in 2004. My local tournament organizer was nice enough to put me up in a hotel, so I was able to go to this event without being sponsored. I don't really have any misgivings about the climate I live in, but it's pretty neat to go, occasionally, to warmer parts of the world in the wintertime. I was less focused on travel activities, being at my first PT, but this was about the time that Upper Deck's OP was getting off the ground, and Wizards of the Coast was having their annual tournament organizer meeting in town, and I managed to tag along to enough expense-account meals that I didn't have to pay for food all weekend.
• San Francisco—The World Championship is an extra special event, and going to a city that I had lived in and love to visit made it a little bit more special. I went on an unexpectedly epic lunch to my favorite sushi restaurant with Sheldon Menery and Collin Jackson. We were housed in a Fisherman's Wharf hotel (a part of town I'd never frequented) that was next to a bar with roughly 273,849 beers on tap. And visiting friends after the tournament, I ended up at a barbecue in the Mission District (my old haunts) at a house where, it turned out, John Finkel's sister lived. How random.
• Nagoya, Japan—My first (and so far, only) foray out of the country for judging purposes. Seattle L3 Tony Mayer and I went early and stayed late, with the bulk of our extra time spent in Tokyo. We visited the fish market and had the freshest of fresh sushi at 6AM. We spent a lot of time on the subway, feeling tall (I have a great photo of Osyp Lebedovich towering over a car of uniformed schoolgirls) and wandering into any building that looked interesting. We had a wonderful but slightly terrifying night out in an amazing private jazz club—a story unfortunately too long to recount here—which we escaped from intact, save for an aching, lonely emptiness to our wallets. The most exhausted I've ever made myself on any trip, anywhere.
• Baltimore—I've been to Baltimore twice now for a pair of US National Championships. I've seen a tiny handful of members of Wizards R&D confront a literal tableful of crab. I've sweated through a baseball game in some of the least pleasant weather I've ever seen. And I've listened to crazed senior judges, the gleam of madness in their eyes, rave about grilled cheese sandwiches. I can't say I've seen much of Baltimore; we've stayed in a fairly tourist-laden part of town, but I've certainly enjoyed myself.
• Atlanta—Somewhat surprising to me was that the weather in Atlanta was not nearly as bad as the weather in Baltimore. I had amazing heirloom tomatoes at a fine Italian restaurant (who knew?). I also had my first experience of churrascaria at the Atlanta Fogo de Chao. The parking valet there had the same tattoo I do (a 45-RPM record spacer) in the same spot (top of the forearm, just inside the elbow).
• Fitchburg—Well, they can't all be winners.

The city I'm most disappointed to have missed in my judging travels is Prague, which I've always wanted to see. A close second is Paris, though I have been to that city on my own. But I know that absent fantastic wealth and an ostrich's mentality about the environmental concerns of extensive travel, there's no way I can hope to see every city worth visiting, so I don't sweat it. Travel is worth doing, though, and I hope that if you get to travel for Magic-related reasons, you take some time to stop and smell the local floral specialty. It's remarkable, the extent to which any given tournament site, be it in urban Japan or rural Massachusetts, can feel the same.

Until next time, keep shufflin'.