Well, my friends Sarah, Morgan, Maria, and I left early Sunday morning for the train station. We didn't get held at the border, which is good, so we were quite early getting to the station. After a while more people started showing up, including a woman wearing a "Tolkien Geek" t-shirt. Hmmm... I wonder where she was going!? :)
So, the train ride was uneventful. We ate, took some movies, and slept.

Once we arrived in Toronto we went to our hotel for night one (which was a different hotel from the convention center). We wanted to save money by staying in a cheaper hotel the first night. Well, uck! It was a terrible room! I don't think it had been redecorated since the 60's!

Shortly after dropping off our stuff we headed for the Sherton Center because I had rehearsal for the opening ceremony (which performed the next morning). My friends meandered a bit while I rehearsed. I met a bunch of new people at the rehearsal... we practiced the opening moments and the part where we had to become Mt.Doom so that Frodo could climb us. haha! This rehearsal only lasted an hour and a half... then, it was off to dinner.

After dinner I had to come back to the hotel for about 3 1/2 hours to rehearse more. This time we were in costumes. There were some great costumes... a woman by the name of Julia made a wonderful Haldir costume for herself, and a great Boromir costume for her husband. Excellent work there.
There was also some hobbits, lots of Elves, two Eowyns (in different gowns), a pretty good Aragorn, a gorgeous Galadriel, an adorable female Frodo (she was fun, I invited her to the Pony, I hope she comes!), an awesome Sauron, great orcs/Uruk-hai, and even Tom Bombadil and Goldberry. I managed to get pictures of a lot of them... but some were hard to catch because they were late in arriving. So, we rehearsed the rest of the night... and it was tiring. We didn't get a break, and the work was very physical. We were also under hot stage lights that whole time without and water! I almost felt like passing out at points.
We were basically creating a visual of LOTR that lasted about 10 minutes and it went along with soundtrack snippets. It was pretty cool, I guess. I heard good things about it... the video my friend took is kinda shakey because she was trying to tape around the enormous head that was before her... oh well.
So, at one point during the rehearsals Bruce Hopkins came in and watched for a little while. I didn't want to bother him, because he was talking to people... but at one point he looked over to me and said, "There's my princess." I was in my Eowyn gown :) At that point he came over and shook my hand. I introduced myself and said that we'd met briefly at the Motor City Comicon... I wasn't expecting him to remember... it just shot out of my mouth. But, he said that I made an excellent Eowyn! Yay!

So, that's basically Day One. I went back to the hotel around midnight and slept for about five hours before I had to get up and be back over at the Sherton the next morning.