I feel like I travel all the time. I traveled a massive amount back in 2016-2017 when I first went full-time with Tempo Storm, because I was heavily involved in esports back then. But even now, I feel like I’m going all over the place to all different kinds of conventions and events.
When I went to actually map out my travel to see how many states I’ve been to… I realized that I don’t actually really travel that much. That is, I definitely do travel
frequently, but I generally just go back and forth to the same locations over and over again. One of the most noticeable things that my travel map told me was that I had never been to the southeastern corner of the United States.
So when DreamHack Atlanta came up and our PUBG Mobile team was going to compete there, I seized the opportunity.
DreamHack and ESL only provided lodging for our players, so our PUBG Mobile manager needed to get a hotel room anyway. This functionally meant that I could share a room with our manager, and our only effective cost for me to attend would be my airfare. With most things aligning well enough for me to be able to experience the southeast for the first time, I hopped on a plane and made my way over to Atlanta.
I like taking very-early-morning flights out of Las Vegas, so I booked my flight to Atlanta to depart at 6 AM. When I went outside and called an Uber though, apparently nobody was around, so I ended up having to wait longer than anticipated, then also had to pay surge pricing. This cut into my time quite a bit, and I wasn’t able to stop by the lounge to grab some breakfast before I leave like I usually do. That, along with the fact that the cabin was unusually cold and my seat recline was broken, made for one of the most uncomfortable and sickening travel experiences I’ve had in a while.
Things got marginally better when I arrived in Atlanta, but like clockwork, I tend to feel ill for the first ~20 hours after arriving at a new location for travel. It wasn’t incapacitating, though, so I spent the first night taking the PUBG Mobile players out to dinner.
The next day was the actual event. This was my second DreamHack; my first was DreamHack Austin 2016 when we had a Heroes of the Storm and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team competing.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to the convention center early on in the day because I had a string of pretty important meetings lined up, but when I managed to finally wrap those up, I headed over to the Georgia World Congress Center. I made it just barely in time to catch the tail end of the PUBG Mobile team competing.
After tournament day was over (PUBG Mobile only played for a single day), I went with the players for a second team dinner, this time to all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ, which has effectively become a tradition at Tempo Storm at this point. I used to take the players out for a big, satisfying meal on the day that they arrived, but after a few teams got sick from overeating, I stopped doing AYCE KBBQ until
after everyone was done competing.
The AYCE KBBQ restaurant we went to was a bit different and strange compared to what I was used to, but the meat quality was surprisingly good.
… I was busy cooking and had no time to pose for photos.
The city of Atlanta itself was a bit uninviting because it rained for a majority of the time I was there, but it was an interesting experience. I feel like esports events and conventions are relatively sheltered from the outside world, so I didn’t really get to experience the true Atlanta… except for when we were in our Uber on our way to get KBBQ and literally four cars operated by some of the worst drivers I’ve ever seen proceeded to attempt to commit suicide by driving straight into us.
The view from my hotel—the
AC Hotel Atlanta Downtown—was surprisingly good, as it had a nice mix between open and city views, and I was lucky enough to get a room on the eighth floor. The gloomy weather also made for some interesting photo opportunities of the tops of tall buildings completely obscured by fog, which isn’t something that I’m able to see on a regular basis in Las Vegas.
The return flight was much better—the cabin air temperature was much more reasonable, and my seat’s recline worked—and although I was only able to stay in Atlanta for three days (two of which were travel days coming in and going out), it was still a pretty good experience.
I’ve become completely jaded towards conventions and esports tournaments now, but going back to another DreamHack-branded event for the first time since 2016 brought back some traces of pleasant memories from when I was still new to esports and every event was a new experience.
My home city of Las Vegas is obviously very artificial-feeling with very little green, and even Redondo Beach was mostly just misty and gloomy the whole time I was there, so it was quite the sight when I arrived at Irvine and everything was glowingly green and full of life. So much so, that I intentionally went all the way to the rooftop of the parking garage at the Spectrum Center just so I could take this photograph with the nice view.
The restaurant we picked was a Cuban restaurant called the Habana. Although I’m sure I’ve had Cuban food before, I had never been to a restaurant dedicated to Cuban food, so it was somewhat of a new experience for me. I actually don’t remember exactly what dish I ordered, but it was pretty good; the only complaint I had was that the rice was strangely salty, and I would’ve preferred the corn not on the cob.
The following day, I met up with one of my good friends, Doug Wreden, who goes by “DougDoug.” We met up in Beverly Hills so I could give him a tour of Tempo Storm’s new content house, then we headed down to the north side of the Santa Monica Mountains to a nearby sushi restaurant.
One of the final meals of this California trip was an order I put in through Uber Eats while I was at our production studio, where I dropped off the final load of computer and electronics equipment. If you know me, you know that I like trying new and interesting foods, and when I browsed through this Italian restaurant’s menu, I noticed a meat I had never tried before: wild boar.
I ordered some wild boar gnocchi. Unfortunately, I could barely even tell what the boar tasted like, because the sauce was way too salty, the seasoning was way too strong, and the gnocchi was a bit strange (it was the first time I ever had gnocchi, and I am not a fan of the texture at all).
I’ve noticed a recurring theme where, when I order some strange and unconventional meat, it’s usually prepared in some extreme way that completely drowns out the true taste of the meat, so I can’t ever actually figure out what it really tastes like. This happened when I tried alligator, where it was breaded so thick and fried so crisply that it just tasted like popcorn chicken, and it also happened when I tried rabbit, where it was drenched in so much strong gravy that I didn’t even realize there was meat underneath.
After handing everything over to the Redondo Beach team house property manager, I concluded another successful trip to California. As expected if you know my affinity towards early flights, I woke up at 4:30 AM to take a 7:00 AM flight back home to Las Vegas. It coincided well with the sunrise, so I tried to capture a photo from the plane, but unfortunately my phone decided to focus on the dirty airplane window instead of the sun.
The best part of traveling is coming back home.
