Colossalcon East 2017 Convention Report - Poconos Debut
/The Kalahari Waterpark Resorts
The debut of Colossalcon East took place this past weekend from September 8-10, 2017 in Pocono Manor, PA. I've never been to the main "pool party" in Ohio before, so this marks my first time attending a Colossalcon convention. Having run the successful anime con in Ohio for the past 16 years, Colossalcon has now made a successful expansion eastwards to Pennsylvania at the Kalahari Waterpark and Resorts up in the Poconos Mountains. This will be one of those blog posts that I'll just let the pictures do most of the talking.
However, before I jump to the photos I do have to mention some of the pluses and minuses of the con as there is definitely room for improvement. Overall the con was run very well and I like the fact that the schedule (including the cosplay photoshoot coordination) was made available well ahead of time to help people make their plans and preparations. The strengths of this location is numerous. Between the outdoor waterpark, an indoor waterpark which they dub as the largest in America, and a gorgeous woodland area behind the resorts which includes a waterfall (as detailed by the photographer Felix Wong), the Kalahari is an amazing place to go to have fun and take pictures at. The indoor waterpark is amazingly vast, but it is not only warm but very humid so cosplayers in full costume should be mindful of that and be prepared for it.
In terms of improvments, I do wish that they'd use the more popular Guidebook app for their pocket schedule instead of the Grenadine app. The later was just a bit clunky when compared to what I'm used to with the Guidebook app. Also, the convention area itself is rather small, although that is being rectified by the fact that the Kalahari is still building the expansions to the convention hall. However, in the mean time there aren't very many panels rooms and both the dealers room and the arcade/video gaming room are quite small. The video game room in particular is rather sparse which could really use a lot more game systems/stations. Once the expansion is completed it should solve some of those problems and along with that I hope they also build more parking lots or garages as it was rather hard to find a parking spot on Saturday despite there already being a number of sizable lots.
Anyways, on to the pictures.
I didn't actually go to the outdoor waterpark or out to the woods, something that I plan to rectify next year.
Click here to go to my Facebook photography page where I uploaded photo albums from the Saturday Overwatch Swimwear and My Hero Academia cosplay photoshoots.
Click here to go to my YouTube channel where I uploaded videos from the RWBY Panel (featuring Vic Mignogna and Elizabeth Maxwell) and the cosplay Masquerade contest.