Driving in on roads so small they could have been transplanted from England, we'd follow the curves of the landcape, which meant that we couldn't see too far ahead before the road would bend off round another hill. Coupled with the fact that this wasn't a busy road meant that we'd often be the only car visible. Until, of course, someone sped round the corner and headed towards us on the wrong side of the road...

By the end of my trip, I'd just about stopped instinctively cringing about that.

The second scare came at the High Country Inn itself. Tracy and I found our room and Diane028 found us. She'd got there early with her son and her boss' sister and her boss' sister's son (hmm these southerners travel light, hee) and found nobody else but us on the register. So she kept checking new arrivals for Michigan plates...

Well, we checked the register too and couldn't find any mention of any of the other Cosmonauts due to arrive. I didn't have names for all of them, but the ones I did have didn't seem to be registered. For a while it seemed like I'd flown 4,000 miles and driven two days to meet up with one player from Georgia. I'm sure she thought similarly.

There was no possibility of me not recognising Tracy in Detroit. Diane looks just like the picture in my Cosmo gallery, so there was no trouble there either. But the next player to turn up doesn't even have a pic in the gallery (for shame), and as far as I knew he wasn't even expected to turn up. But we're glad he did. Killer Tomato is as lively a character in real life as he is in the game. And for those of you interested, no we didn't recognise him - he recognised me. That set a pattern as I later ended up meeting people all over the continent who I'd never seen before and had no idea of how they would look. Somehow they recognised me.

The four of us played miniature golf (puttputt) for a while, badly. Diane managed the dubious achievement of holing in one many more holes than anyone else, yet still finished easily last.

Then people started arriving. Killer Tomato (formerly Pittsburgh Airhead, a name he changed because everyone thought he was a dizzy blonde) was the one to recognise people. He'd suddenly switch from chatting with us outside the lobby to shouting 'MEEEEELS!' across the car park. Sure enough, there was KMiller13, along with Benning and HeyNow and Jensen. Suddenly we had a meetup after all.

Others arrived in due course. We met Darwinia and GatorsFan in the sprots bar; TootsieBird and her husband on the way to our room; Cavemann and MsCave arrived on the Sunday; and we got to meet the immortal MortalWombat and Ben Stein on a very memorable Saturday evening in the sprots bar. Here's a few players at Blowing Rock and here's most of us on the Sunday morning.

Also, though they didn't stay for the weekend, Tarheel#23 and her husband arrived too and very kindly showed us round Blowing Rock, a charming little town, tourist orientated in the summer but apparently almost deserted in the winter. The joke before the meetup was that we should all bring along our keyboards. Here's Carole with hers : )

This was a wonderful place. Not for the sprots, naturally, but for the fact that in America soft drink refills are free (I like this place). I've only found one place in England that offers free refills (Pizza Hut) and even there the definition of 'free' is stretched somewhat - you have to pay for the privilege of getting them free. Hmm. The other reason that the sprots bar was wonderful is because it hosted NTN Trivia. Junkies all of us. Killer Tomato consistently outshone the rest of us, though it was Darwinia who managed the highest position of the night, a fourth in the entire continent. WTG Dar!

More strange facts about America before I get to the highlight of the weekend. Boone is in a dry county area - no spirits (liquor) served. You can buy beer or wine coolers (click for the result of Diane after one sip of a Daiquiri cooler. And this isn't rare. Apparently there are areas of the south where you can indeed buy spirits but only in miniature bottles. Click here for more stupid age-old laws.

And the best part? Well for me it has to have been the Saturday evening. All of us met up in the sprots bar to play NTN, but later Killer pulled out a movie trivia boardgame (similar to Trivial Pursuit, but all movies) that he'd been given for Christmas but never played. Strange coincidence: Nublet did exactly the same thing in Charleston, the same game, the same unopened Christmas present...

Most of the questions are quotes from films, the answer being the film. Naturally we started doing these in character... Killer and BenStein vs. Tracy and I vs. MoWo and Diane. And I can tell you that MoWo still owns the quickest wit in Cosmo - she is blisteringly fast. Ben isn't far behind and Killer is damn quick too. We bounced the bad puns and asides off each other for hours. Ben and Killer headed off into song. It was a truly magical few hours that brought back all the bad pun hot tub parties in Cosmo. It was worth flying 4,000 miles just for that.

Some of the players were booked in for the full week, but half of us just for the weekend. So most went on the Sunday, Tracy and I on the Monday, but we'd meet up again soon with Kelly and the Caves in Charleston, SC.

All in all, a success. A (deliberately) disorganised meetup, but there were fifteen players from two countries and ten states. And hopefully next year we can have a big (organised) meetup aboard the huge paddlesteamer captained by Tootsie's husband. A three day cruise down the Mississippi or Ohio rivers in the company of Cosmonauts would be a true experience. Here's to hoping.