Camp Half Blood tickets

There is a bookstore in Austin called "Half Price Books" and they run summer camps for kids. One of the most popular ones is Camp Half Blood where the author of the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series, Rick Riordan, comes along too. The kids make swords and do mythical stuff and generally have a great time. In fact it's so popular that the tickets sell out quickly. Very quickly. Very, very quickly. In fact so quickly that people couldn't get tickets the day after they went on sale.

I was dispatched to the shop to buy two tickets for Alex and Ben and I dutifully got up at 5am on a Saturday morning and arrived at the bookstore to join the queue. The end of the queue was only a few yards away from the book shop entrance, unfortunately it had already gone round the block to get to that point! It was actually some 200 yards or so long already and the doors weren't going to open until 9am. I heard that some people at the head of the queue had been there since 2pm the previous day. That is dedication to your kids. The relentlessly cheerful organisers did provide hot coffee and some doughnuts which was appreciated by all.

This year the tickets did not sell out before the end of the queue, as they had on previous occasions and what you see below is the result of a 6 hour wait.

The boys are excited about going to camp, becoming Roman deities, fighting each other and running around with their home made swords and axes this summer.