Barcelona

I haven't blogged in a while, but I thought I would do a post about my Barcelona trip, rather than 58 tweets.

Why Barcelona?

I discovered two years ago when I did the Eurocon in Dublin the week after LonCon that Eurocon isn't a great professional convention.  In Dublin, so much so that I decided to just put the bill for the whole stay as a personal expense so I could enjoy Dublin guilt free.  But, Barcelona is the heart of the Spanish publishing business, so when I saw the next Eurocon would be in Barcelona, I eyed it as a chance to see Spanish publishers on their home turf with more time to talk and learn than in the 30 minute appointments that we have in endless succession at London Book Fair.  And to visit Spanish bookstores, and with our agents for the Spanish market.  Any bar-con or schmoozing that Eurocon presented would be an add-on.  And then it turned out that Eurocon dovetailed nicely with a European tour that Brandon Sanderson had on his schedule, so we worked the itinerary that Brandon could be in Barcdlona for Eurocon, an opportunity that the convention and his publishers, Ediciones B, we're happy to take advantage of. It all worked out very nicely.

Now that I have employees and an iPad, I do a lot less personal preparation for a trip like this than I used to.  Krystyna Lopez, the head of foreign rights for the agency, was joining me, so she and her assistant Rebecca took care of slotting the publishers and arranging the schedule. I just kind of show up and go where I'm told.  I ended up buying a couple guide books a few days before the trip, but hardly looked at them.

So Krystyna and I get to Barcelona at 6:30 AM, and...

For one, the US is not a very welcoming country.  Getting into the US is an ordeal even for citizens with forms and lines and a general belief everyone is a criminal.  Getting into Spain, Italy, the U.K -- much smoother.  They put out a welcome mat, we put out a "Beware of Dog" sign.  

We decided to aim for the Aerobus. It was waiting and ready, and it wasn't yet 7AM, so why pay for a cab.  Good call. The bus runs often, gets into town quickly, had good free WiFi.   In a bit, the subway will also go out to the airport, but for now, the bus is a good choice if you've packed light and aren't too far from where the bus stops downtown.

And the four days I've had in Barcelona? I had no idea what to expect, and the first four of our seven days in the city have been amazing.

General impressions

Walking: it's both a great walking city and an awful one.  The awful last -- by the time you get the yellow signal as a pedestrian, you're already dead.  New York, it means most people can start at the yellow and have time to cross the street. Here, three quick flashes, time to cross one lane, and the cars are ready to bear down.  Almost all the intersections, the crosswalk is set back from the corner, which is fine if you're going on a diagonal route and awful if going in a straight line because every corner means adding time. Street signs are often hard to find, like London usually on the buildings, but with less consistency and visibility. And because most of the corners are rounded and the buildings set back in a circle, it's harder to see what's at any given corner, including the street sign.  Also, very few of the buildings have numbers on them.  And traffic moves. You can't jaywalk because it's rare to have cars backed up and not going anywhere.  So you detour to the crosswalk, and patiently wait for the light. Amd yet, it's also a city with lots of wide thoroughfares with pedestrian promenades and benches and bikeways.

Dining: Most restaurants have lunch hours that may not start before 13:00 and dinner hours that may begin at 20:00.  But there are also all sorts of cafes and patisseries and convenience stores and the like that are open. Meal hours are regimented, but you will rarely need to go far in the downtown areas to find someplace to get something to eat. And there is a variety of food today. This is the biggest thing for me in comparing with Paris. There, after a late movie in bustling Montparnasse, actual dining options were about non-existent, bistros that were open only for drinks after 9:30. My late night dining was from a train station vending machine.  And all the bistros had similar menus, the patisseries the same baked goods.  Barcelona, coming back from movie after midnight, I could find a few places still serving food and some 24 hour stores, even though I wasn't walking through the central part of downtown. There are some ubiquitous food items, but variety as well. And while there is no lack of paella, I can go not too far afield from my hotel and find Indian, Thai, Asian, Russian, Italian, and more.  Bottom line, I've had many dishes that I've never had at the fancy meals required by the business engagements, but also gone to a burger place, Indian, and had grab and go pizza.  I chose to come to Barcelona, which didn't require having one type of food for an entire week.

Activities:

Day one, I walked down to the inner harbor area and Las Ramblas, the major tourist shopping thoroughfare, and then up to Parc Gaudie with views down on the city.  Wonderful dinner hosted by Ediciones B, the Spanish publishers for Brandon Sanderson.

Day two, publisher meetings during the day, and Brandon Sanderson signing at Gigamesh, a giant specialty shop for all things nerd, with 350+ people on line to meet Brandon.  I stayed til 9:30, then went to see a British film, Ken Loach's I Daniel Blake, on the large screen of an art house.  I don't consider any trip complete without seeing a movie!

Day three, another wonderful meal at lunch time, with the agent I've worked with in Spain for thirty years, dating to the start of my career at Scott Meredith. Preceded by publisher meetings, followed by a Brandon Sanderson signing at the major FNAC downtown, and then our taking Brandon out for dinner. Another excellent meal, location recommended by the editor of Planeta's Minotauro imprint. That signing had an attendance cap, and was lower key than the event at Gigamesh.

Day four, I took advantage of a free morning to walk around the parks near parliament, then along the actual beach, before heading inland for lunch with Aliette de Bodard, whose work we have in our ebook program via John Berlyne and Zeno Agency. Another nice meal. Then over to Eurocon to see two Q&A sessions with Brandon Sanderson. 

More I could say, but an early wake up call to day trip to Valencia to see our client Mark Hodder.

The Show Must Go Off

Usually I'm very big on trying to get things back to normal as soon as possible, which may be exactly why I'm totally pissed that the city wants to run a marathon on Sunday.

Because in this case, that's not "back to normal," it's indulging the marathon over the interests of a  city that can't get where it wants to go.

Buses and trains from my neighborhood into Queens are totally packed.  You've got to wait and watch 'em go buy without stopping or without room to get on.  Even Thursday night, when the subway was running somewhat, the 59th St. Bridge was still being used by thousands upon thousands of people as their best route in and out of Manhattan.  Because it is.  The alternative is waiting for at least two trains or two buses, agonizingly long waits, and you can in fact walk faster.  In fact, Brady McReynolds in my office had two "commutes" yesterday that were longer than it might have taken for him to walk 9.5 miles to/from work.

So what is the city going to do on Saturday night?  It is going to close the bike/ped lane over the 59th St. Bridge for a full day.  And it's also going to disrupt the bus traffic over the 59th St. Bridge for several hours, which is just what we need.  And it's not like, as limited as the subway/bus service is, that I'm just going to hop on the couple of limited service subway lines heading into Manhattan.  So I sure won't be able to get my life back to normal.  I have theatre tickets on Sunday that will be very difficult to use because there won't be a good way to get into Manhattan.

And it's not just me.  The marathon will make it difficult for people to get to the Williamsburg Bridge.  It will make it difficult for people to get from the East to West sides of Manhattan above 59th St., or for people to get from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to other parts of Manhattan.

Obviously, the Marathon causes disruptions every year, but during a normal year I will smile and make do for a day because I might prefer to walk into Manhattan but I don't have to, I have a choice of fully operational subway lines that I and all the Marathon tourists can join.   This year, your Marathon turns Manhattan back into an island.

And if you can't tell, I'm not happy.

Bouchercon

The World Science Fiction Comvention is always exhilarating and exhausting for me.

Bouchercon is a little different. Named for the mystery fiction critic Anthony Boucher, it is the World Fantasy of the mystery genre in that it is a heavy networking convention, a busy bar scene for the professionals, but without the membership cap, and more fans, and people who actually go to panels.  It isn't near as exhilarating for me as a WorldCon, but I also have fewer clients, so there's a little less scheduling pressure.  And while there's a strong bar scene at night, there aren't the room parties and hospitality suites that are such an important part of the scene, social and business and fannish all in one, at the major sf conventions, so it doesn't require as much after hours time.

So I had clients to see and award ceremonies to attend, I was also able to use the weekend to see some of Cleveland and really, most importantly, to recharge the batteries a bit after an exhausting September with so many long days in the office that I didn't have energy at night to dig into the reading pile.

So, seeing Cleveland:

I saw my first game at Progressive Field, the baseball stadium formerly known as Jacobs Field, the home of the Cleveland Indians.  I'd gotten tickets on Stubhub when there was still a chance the Indians could make a wild card run, possibly the best seats I've ever had for a ballgame in the third row behind home plate.  Expensive for Cleveland, but a bargain by NYC standards where you can pay $100 for a bleacher seat at Citi Field.  In retrospect I overpaid because the Indians collapsed, fired their manager the week before, weren't in it, and they were playing the Chicago White Sox who had just been eliminated from the AL Central race.  The ballpark fits in nicely at the edge of downtown. It was nice, but with three levels of suites even the first row of the upper deck looked awfully high up and I'm not sure how happy I'd be seeing a game from there.  I got to see the Chicago White Sox hit 5 homers, several of them quite impressive, including Dan Johnson becoming only the 15th White Sox player and 4th visiting player in Jacobs Field history to hit 3 homers in a game.  Paul Konerko needed 2 hits to tie Frank Thomas for #3 on the all-time White Sox hit list but got only one.  Ketchup, Mustard and Onion all seemed to be cheating in the footrace.  All in all, it was a nice evening.

On a free afternoon, I visited my 136th and 137th Whole Foods Markets, in the rich eastern suburbs.  It was a gorgeous fall day, and the two stores were located around 4.5 miles away from one another, providing a nice excuse to have a very pleasant stroll on a very nice day.  The Whole Foods at Cedar Center is very, very nice.  The one in Chagrin is a a former Wild Oats location, a little bit smaller, but pleasant enough.  And in the same mall as an outlet of Malley's Chocolates.  I got some "good luck" boxes for my award nominated clients, and some to save for when everyone is back in the office next week.

And after the convention was over, I walked down Euclid Ave. in the rain out to University Circle where Case Western is located along with many of the major Cleveland cultural institutions, with a detour to Shaker Square, the second oldest planned outdoor shopping area in the country, or so the sign said.  It's a nice area, the cultural insitutions set in a parklike setting, a very attractive Little Italy tucked alone one end.  The day would have been nicer if it wasn't raining, but I felt as if I'd really gotten my feet on the ground in the city.

I only needed a couple spare hours to walk 1.5 miles out to West Side Market, which is nicer than Lexington Market in Baltimore but maybe not quite as nice or diverse as Philly's Reading Terminal Market.  The bakeries were "enh," but there were lots and lots of fresh fruit vendors and meat vendors and cheese vendors and etc. etc.  The market is celebrating its centennial this year.

Cleveland was one of the very first cities in the world to build a train line out to its airport.  This was quite nice, $2.25 for a quick ride from the airport to the heart of downtown.  There are a couple other light rail lines heading out to the rich eastern suburbs.  Cleveland is also one of the cities that is using BRT, or Bus Rapid Transit, as a substitute for light rail. The "Health Line" runs several miles from downtown past the Playhouse Square theatre district, Cleveland State University, and then to the Cleveland Clinic, the Case Western University Hospitals, the Stokes Hospitals, etc. etc., thus having its name.  BRT uses fancy looking buses, limited stops, prepaid boarding that allows all door exit/entry, dedicated bus lanes, and other features, to make it an attractive alternative to standard bus service.  In a big city like New York, you've got to have subways that can avoid traffic.  The problem with BRT for really high density locations is that none of these things change the fact that you're stuck in traffic with all the other traffic, this is why LA really needs to have the so-called "subway to the sea" running under Wilshire Blvd., instead of the Metro Rapid lines that sit in Wilshire Blvd., even in the DC suburbs I don't think BRT would work as a substitute for the "purple line" because there's too much traffic too much of the time on the East-West Highway for anything that's going to share the traffic lanes to be really appealing.  But on the I-270 corridor in suburban DC, or in someplace like Cleveland where you can have traffic but not absolute killer traffic, BRT probably is a cost-effective substiture for laying rails.

But there's plenty not to like about Cleveland.

Everyone at Bouchercon got to go to to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Thursday night for the opening ceremonies courtesy of Amazon's Thomas & Mercer mystery pubilshing imprint.  I wasn't impressed with the Hall of Fame.  It didn't have an actual Hall of Fame with information on all of the inductees, the Hall area had glass inscribed signatures of all the inductees and plaques on the newest class, but not on everyone.  The exhibits didn't do much for me at all.  I've listened to plenty of rock and roll in my life, I'd expected to like this more, I was disappointed not to find much to like at all in the museum.

Like other cities, every bit of Cleveland is carved into a district, the Warehouse District and the Flats and the Gateway and Playhouse Square and Midtown and Fairfax and University Circule and Civic Center and this district and that district.  But let's say that the renaissance of Cleveland is still a work in progress.

Bouchercon was being held in the heart of downtown, the Civic Center/Tower Center Districts.  Tower Center is the tallest buidling in Cleveland, above a rail crossroads.  With some hotels and a cheesy mall and a movie theatre and a casino, there's some life here.  But, the only restaurants in the mall were food court, Houlihan's, Morton's, and Planet Hollywood.  In fact, the restaurant options are very limited.  A small restaurant row on E. 4th St.  Lots of sports bars near the baseball stadium and arena.  The Warehouse District has some eateries.  Further afield, you could find a handful of places in the Playhouse Square district.  But honestly, just not a lot of "there" there.  And downtown living was concentrated almost entirely in the Warehouse District which is full of renovated old warehouse buildings that now house yuppie lofts with a few new builds, and then there's the Flats district on both sides of the river with a lot of housing on the river's west bank.

On the other hand, the downtown area also didn't give this sense that you can get in parts of Philly or Baltimore that you'll go one block from the fancy museum and find yourself in a combat zone.  And the Playhouse Square district is full of many beautiful theatres, all in active use, believably the second biggest concentration of active theatrest outside of NY. And the cultural institutions out in University Circle are among the nicest cultural campuses you're going to find.

And the architecture!

The arcade where the Hyatt is, it's the most beautiful old shopping arcade, stunningly gorgeous.  And there are the Colonial Shops across the street. And you can peek in beautiful old office building after glorious old department store and spectacularly restored theatre, place after place after place of incredible beauty.  This is an asset that you don't have in a lot of other downtowns.

The convention itself...

The opening ceremonies at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame could have been better done.  If the program book had said "Hall open at 7, ceremony starts at 8," maybe there woudln't have been this flood of people arriving right at 7 when the doors weren't even open, so that it took until 7:45 for the line to finally die down, with the earliest arrivals sitting for an hour waiting for the ceremony to begin when they could have been visiting the galleries.  And there wasn't any official announcement or indication that there were going to be awards presented at the opening ceremonies.

The dealers room didn't have a Larry Smith or anyone selling a wide mix of new releases.  Mostly used/rare dealers selling mostly books by Bouchercon attendees.

Announcing raffle winner after raffle winner after raffle winner after raffle winner before the presentation of the Anthony Awards wasn't such a good idea.

There was some weird architecture to the hotel, with a new ballroom attached to the old original ballrooms in the hotel, which was erected in 1918.  Some oddities, like of the Grand Ballroom was sectioned into A and B parts, getting from A to B meant taking the stairs down a level and walking to another escalator up.  On the other hand the ballroom had a beautiful balcony seating area.

But by and large, people were having a good time.  The panels were well-attended.

And really, I can't complain too much about a convention where a client of mine wins two different awards!

Charlaine Harris hadn't been optimistic going in about her chances of winning in the Non-Fiction/Related categories for either the Macavity or Anthony Awards for her Sookie Stackhouse Companion.  Understandably so, in a way, you think of these awards as going to major important works of non-fiction, this isn't a category where I'd want to be competing for an Anthony against a Pulitzer-winning author like Michael Dirda of the Washington Post.  Add to that, we were all very close to the Companion, which had been a lot harder to put together than had been anticipated going in.

So were were all surprised and delighted on Thursday night when Charlaine and The Sookie Stackhouse Companion were announced as the winners of the Macavaity.  With the one surprising win, we had to think more seriously that maybe there would be an Anthony Award in our futures as well, but still, I think we were all still a bit surprised to come up with a double victory when the Anthony winners were announced on Saturday.

It's a little strange to say about an award in a non-fiction category, but I do think part of the success of the Companion is because it has a great novella by Charlaine, "Small Town Wedding," that is certainly the best piece of Sookie Stackhouse short fiction, if not one of the best pieces of Sookie fiction, period.  And when you add to that all of the excellent non-fiction in the Companion, the timetables and concordance and interviews and recipes, it is a potent brew.

I had lunch with Charlaine Harris and her personal assistant Paula Woldan at the Chocolate Bar, an interesting idea for a restaurant in a nice setting at the century-old Arcade shoppng area, but not actually a nice restaurant.  My alfredo badly needed pepper, the cupcakes were like fresh-from-freezer Sara Lee.

Another lunch was with Joe Clifford Faust at Skyline Chili, an Ohio institution where they serve chile atop spaghetti and then top it all with generous handfuls of shredded cheddar.  I think I prefer the New York equivalent of chili mac, where chili and macaroni and cheese reside on the same plate.  Afterwards we went to a comic book store in Parma that had been around for an impressive 28 years.

Jeri Westerson and Toni Kelner were the other current JABberwocky clients at the convention.

Jeri has ten award nominations for her first four Crispin Guest novels and was up again here.  I don't think we were surprised that she didn't win, but her Crispin Guest books are awfully good, and it would mean so much to me to see her win one of these some year.  Jeri travelled far afield to go to a library event and a bookstore event.

Toni is launching a new mystery series under a pseuodonym that promises to be a lot of fun, and she continues to help Charlaine edit wonderful paranormal anthologies, the most recent of which is An Apple for the Creature.

I had drinks with Rochelle Staub, a muliple award nominated author for Who Do, Voodoo.  We look forward to having Rochelle on our client list!

There were multiple publisher cocktail parties or receptions, so I had my full of cheese cubes and chicken tenders.

So that's a quick glimpse at Bouchercon.  I've got to tell you, there are worse jobs I can have than this one.

when your doctor runs the Waystone Inn

You know from some of my other posts on these subjects that I have very passionate feelings about the direction our country is taking on matters of so-called security. These manifest themselves with particular, and sometimes and unfortunately ill-advised and untimely and misdirected passion, when a hotel in the US demands a photo ID at check-in.

We don't, or at least so I thought until I was reading the NY Times about the Lake Shore Limited, need papers to travel in the country.  If we need papers to check in at a hotel, then we need papers.

Beyond that...   the reasons a hotel will give for this are basically the same, that the person checking in with my credit card isn't actually me, so I am being protected by the hotel from credit card fraud and/or identity theft.

I would reasonably guess that fraud is most likely to occur for a spur of the moment booking.  But certainly in my circle, most -- not all but most -- people book well in advance  And the hotel knows things about you or your reservation. As an example, you are a member of the hotel's reward program and are paying with the card that was used to guarantee the reservation or a card that is in your profile with the hotel chain or staying at a hotel or a region where you often stay or staying in conjunction with a conference or other group event.

For almost all of my own bookings, the chances of either credit card or identity fraud would be along the lines of "I lose my bag at the airport, someone steals bag, notices a printout of my hotel reservation, decides it's a good rate, and would be nice to pretend to be me and stay at hotel under my name." The odds of this happening are not good. If it did happen, the odds that the credit card company would be informed of the theft, could notice at the card was authorized at the hotel after it was stolen, could inform the local police and arrest the miscreant while he is in "my" room at the hotel -- the odds the crime would result in somebody being arrested are better than the odds of the crime ever happening in the first place.

If anyone wants to provide me with the percentage of credit card fraud that takes place in hotels vs gas stations or retail or as fraudulent telecommunications charges or the like that shows my analysis to be wrong, please do let me know.  When someone did ring up charges on my card, it was at gas stations, Walmart, etc., not two nights at a hotel.  If someone has facts to show the percent of fraud on advance vs newish reservations, I'll happily correct.

More than one hotel tells me if a charge is contested they need to have checked photo ID to avoid having a chargeback, and I don't know if that can be confirmed.  In my experience the credit card industry wants to encourage you to use your card for more things in more places. It isn't so long ago I had to sign for small purchases under $25 at one merchant I frequent.  Not any more.  Not so long ago you couldn't use your credit card at McDonalds or the local movie theatre but the credit card companies worked with these places to get the cards working.  The card companies feel they have much better ways of detecting fraudulent use than some clerk at the Four Points by Sheraton in Times Square detecting a fake Idaho drivers license.

Oh -- if a hotel refuses to let you check in for a night without a photo ID, try and eat at that same hotel's fancy restaurant and pay with that exact same credit card on that exact same day and see if they'll ask for a photo ID at the end of your nice expensive dinner. This happened to me recently at a Manhattan hotel. I wasn't even staying there but wanted just to put the incidentals for a third party on my card.  The same meal I couldn't pay for one way, they were perfectly happy to have me pay for the other way. Could someone please give me the logic for that which wouldn't start to totally collapse in and twist on itself?

I was watching at a hotel recently while an entire water polo team was being checked in merrily giving their photo IDs. Did they have a ringer?  Someone snuck in to the team bus who wasn't on the team?  They were actually a ring of credit card thieves? This isn't airport security where for all my rants I don't go along with the argument that you never check grandma. Because then, yes, the bad guys will recruit grandma.  This is just stupid. This is stupid like proofing grandma and grampa before selling them beer at a ballpark. I hate being next to drunken louts at a ballpark, but that's stupid.  And having a water polo team all show photo IDs to get their keys is stupid. If one of them later contests the credit card charge, the manager at the hotel can call the coach and the school and have words with them. I strongly doubt that's a conversation he'll have to have.

And this stuff isn't without a cost. You don't pay all the costs of your driving because there's the gas fumes people breathe in or the hidden subsidies of the road system. Here, everyone spends more time checking in at the hotel. Maybe you don't notice that but think of every checkout line you are on and then think on that line if every single credit card purchase requires a photo ID.  It's not like two $89 nights at a hotel is more costly than a lot of trips we have to Target to do the back to school.

No, I'm sorry, but no hotel should require a photo ID as a condition of check-in. It's an insult to the guest, it makes visiting a hotel like visiting a doctor where first thing you must do is show your insurance. It protects against a not so existent threat. It's an infringement on our liberty. And if everyone started to complain about this instead of acting like it's perfectly reasonable maybe they would stop.

Plenty of hotels don't ask for ID and seem to survive. Those that do should clearly inform at the reservation process.  I will choose hotels that have honest guests, that don't require me to show my papers, instead of hotels that host criminals.

Ashfall, Part 2

Window Shopping at the Louvre
So when we left off on this here, Eddie and I were collapsing in our hotel rooms after a very long day full of unexpected surprises on the way to London Book Fair.

One bank
I got a pretty decent night's sleep, and I had one goal for my morning in Paris before we headed off to catch the Eurostar. I wasn't in Paris if I didn't go to the Seine, which looked close enough for a round trip walk if I kept about my business. Down by the big department store and the opera house, stop at one chocolatier that's been around for 80 years then on next block see one that's been around for 90 years and realize you picked the wrong one. Down to the Louvre, walk along both banks of the Seine because I don't want anyone to think I'm slighting the left or the right bank or vice versa. Emerge near big old buildings and think "gee, I bet Benjamin Franklin visited some of these."

Another bank
It was a wonderful and delightful morning, in part because of the unexpectedness of it.

We then found our way to Gare du Nord and checked in at the mobbed counters for the Eurostar, with all services booked until some time the next day or day after at this point because everyone was trying to take the train. It was while reading newspapers in the departure lounge that some of the joy of the experience started to fade, as it became clear that the ash cloud which diverted us wasn't just a one day thing, and that I'd gotten a lot of chocolates to give away at our table at London Book Fair to people who might not be coming if things didn't resolve themselves pretty quick like. This did not make me happy.

Tilt your head; my luxury "tip up" seat between cars on the Eurostar

But there wasn't much time to mope with my eagerly anticipated first ride on the Eurostar about to begin. But we were in for a surprise, which explained why we had to go through a staffed check-in gate instead of the automated. Our very expensive first class seats weren't seats in the actual train. No, we were luck to get "tip-up" seats, the jump seats in the entry vestibule between cars. Kind of like being told that your first class seat on an airplane was the jump seat next to the galley door. It wasn't quite as bad as all that, because we did get to sit in actual seats for the first leg of the journey to Lille, where more people would be getting on and we'd be getting the boot. And it was a very nice meal service. And it certainly made for a train ride to remember.

Eddie enjoying the meal service on board the Eurostar in our first class accommodations
I've always been a fan of high speed rail in theory, and I loved partaking of it in practice. The train moved slowly until right around DeGaulle airport when it finally heads off on its own dedicated tracks, and then it speeds along, my does it speed along. In the US we're lucky to match the speed of cars on the interstate, here we just zoom by. The countryside was beautiful, the French landscape as full of churches as the British landscape can be of castles. And churches.

Peter V. Brett signing at London's Forbidden Planet
Alas, the Book Fair ended up being pretty much the debacle I'd started to fear it might be when I was reading newspapers at Gare du Nord. Peter V. Brett had come up a little before us, he was one of the last planes to land at Heathrow before it was shut down and we got to Europe just before the European airspace closed pretty much completely. My second employee Jessie Cammack was supposed to come out the next day and never made it. All in all, two thirds of our appointments cancelled. And we got to sit around the Fair during the downtime wondering if/how we might ever get home.

Thanks Emma/HarperUK for getting us the artwork and John Berlyne at Zeno Agency for designing these nifty signs, which more people will see on blog than at the ash-interrupted London Book Fair
Because Peter was out in support of the UK launch of his Desert Spear, which we knew would be big, and because the book has in general been quite big on a global basis, we decided to show the flag by taking out some signs in the Rights Centre, and also by having a meet and greet for our sub-agents and Peter's publishers in attendance at the Fair to meet with Peter at a Russian restaurant a short walk from the Fair. Hardly anyone to look at the signs, and we had 12 people for our big event instead of 35, which was very deflating. But those who attended had a very good time, and I would recommend Nikita's in London to anyone looking for some good Russian food and drink.

In the end, UK airspace reopened in time for Peter, Eddie and I all to return on time on our originally scheduled flights, but in ways good and bad it was a week to remember.

Ashfall

Things were so busy after London Book Fair, not just with work but with getting settled into a new apartment, that I never got around to sharing some pictures of Josh(ua) & Ed(die)'s Excellent Adventure getting there.

So Eddie and I are just kind of flying along to London, we're kind of on the Irish leg of the trip, and I do notice that we do a turn over Ireland at a point in time when I'm pretty much expecting a straight flight until maybe you go into holding getting into Heathrow. And then a little bit later the pilot comes on with some bad news from the cockpit.

So let me say, very clearly, that there are worse things when you hear about bad news from the cockpit to be told that you're getting to go to Paris. Which is what we're told. Maybe you've been hearing about this volcano in Iceland, and there's this ash cloud, and Heathrow is closed, and so we're not going there. The moment I heard this, I'm kind of excited. I've never been to Paris. Well, once, in 1980, a refueling stop in Orly. Doesn't count. So we're going to Paris, and I'm thinking very strongly that I don't care what Delta's plans are for getting us to London, but that I'm taking the Eurostar. Even if it means maybe booking the 3PM that day or something, but I'm going on the Eurostar. I'm really excited about this.

So we settle in at Charles DeGaulle to await our fate. Delta is going to try and get a bus. I tell Eddie to try and get us Eurostar tickets. We don't quite know just how much disruption this ash cloud is causing. Eddie keeps getting error messages as he tries to book tickets on his laptop, and then the one or two times he is able to get to the credit card stage we run into problems because one of my credit cards can get very picky if I'm shopping online if you do or don't have the "5th" or a "5" or if there's a comma and etc., and I'm a little too frazzled to focus that I do know the exact right way the address needs to look. And in the meantime, we can't go anyplace anyway because if we can't get Eurostar tickets then we sure better have our boarding pass for the bus which indeed Delta is able to arrange. Did we get the bus boarding pass before I was able to focus and get the address looking the right way for us to finally book Eurostar tickets? Well, whatever, we go through customs, claim our bags, have Eurostar tickets, and call our French sub-agents Anne and Pierre Lenclud to see what they're up to that afternoon.

Waiting to audition at the Moulin Rouge, right near our hotel.

This is quite the grand adventure. I know enough to help some tourists at the ATM machine who don't realize they're asking for too many Euros and probably over their withdrawal limit which is why they're not able to withdraw, but bottom line I'm in a strange airport where I don't know the language and I'm learning how signs start to not make any sense when you don't know the language and we're trying to figure out the subway or the train into downtown and who knows which ticket window or which vending machine or which what is the one we need, thank God Eddie's there to help with all this. Somehow we find our way to the right train to go downtown, I get to see French books in a Hudson News type thing at Gare du Nord, we find our way to the Metro, we find our way to the offices of our French agents in the 9th, I have no idea where we are but I can at least make sense of the map in the station as we exit.
Eddie at Sacre Coeur
If you like old-fashioned physical books, you'd love the offices of our French agents, Anne and Pierre Lenclud. There are books everywhere, on shelves and on tables and on floors and on any possible surface. I could have spent hours there, but we were also hungry. We went to a French/Hungarian restaurant a few blocks away. I don't like French cuisine much and figured the restaurant had this combination of cuisines because there are Hungarians involved somewhere, so I got a wonderful paprika chicken dish which did not go over well with the expectation that I was in Paris and should eat French. I did have wine, which isn't one of my favorite pastimes. We went into a small bookshop not well-endowed with JABberwocky clients. Anne and Pierre were kind enough to arrange rooms for us at a hotel nearby, and Pierre walked us over. I've always felt highly of the work Anne and Pierre do for the agency and our clients, we've been together for the entire 25 years I've been in the business as their good deeds date back to my tenure at the Scott Meredith Agency, this day they went above and beyond the call as people to help us out and be hospitable unexpectedly and on short notice.The view from Sacre Coeur
After we freshened up, Eddie and I went on a walk, with Eddie in charge of the map. We found out the Moulin Rouge was just down the street from our hotel. We walked past (but not in, as closing time was approaching) Montmartre cemetery and climbed higher and higher to the Basilique de Sacre Coeur, some nice glimpses of view along the way and spectacular views from Sacre Coeur itself. The interiors are as stunning as the views, and our arrival at the summit of Sacre Coeur was truly a capstone to a day that had become much more an adventure than ever anticipated 12 hours before. With Eddie guiding the way, we meandered back to the hotel. And I don't think I can begin to say where we meandered.

More to come...

security!

You know how much I love our airport security regime, so here's a nice article sent my way courtesy of a tweet from Elizabeth Moon

http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/08/06/airport_security/index.html

And of course it isn't just at the airport. Still have fond memories of the Washington Nationals, who let you bring in a factory-sealed water bottle but not the same bottle empty. For all the TSA lunacy, at least they let me bring an empty bottle in to fill up at water fountain and take on to plane.

Why do we put up with this, people? Why do we put up with it??

It's still just a cupcake

Maybe I need to get out of town more.

In around 33 hours actually in the Washington DC area over the weekend, I managed to see 3 plays, visit 1 B. Dalton, 4 B&Ns, 4 Borders, chow down at 2 Whole Foods and a Pizzeria Uno, do the Saturday NY Times puzzle, two from Sunday, a regular and a cryptic, read 70% of the new Violette Malan book and get started on Tanya Huff's next.

I'll talk more about the plays later, but just a few idle observations.

I've sung the praises of Georgetown Cupcake before, no doubt I'll do so again, they're some of the only overpriced cupcakes that at least taste really, really, really good. But what is the world coming to when I pop by their new expanded flagship location in Georgetown and see over 30 people curled around in the store waiting to buy cupcakes. It's just a cupcake. It's not worth waiting, sorry, no possible way unless it's your child's bar mitzvah and the caterer's truck with the viennese table pastries overturned on the beltway, that anyone should wait 30 minutes for a friggin' cupcake. I noticed they had a new location in Bethesda down the street from the B&N on Bethesda Row, much closer to that B&N than the Georgetown location is to the B&N in Georgetown, and the Bethesda store does a much better business in sf/fantasy than the one in Georgetown, so I expect in the future that I'll go to the Bethesda location, and I did wait five minutes or so the next day. And yes, the carrot cupcake was yummy, and the chocolate/vanilla and the key lime pie and the chocolate mint, even though the icing had kind of run off from the top of the cupcake by the time I ate them back home after taking them around with me for several hours and I had to scoop the icing back on top of the cupcakes.

The original home of the Rockville Pike Borders, which became an Anthropologie when Borders moved down the street into White Flint Mall, is an Anthropologie no more. The store is up for rent, so if any of you want to open a store in a historic retail location on 11500 Rockville Pike... And this huge Borders location no longer has even a single visible store-discretion shelf facing in its Front of Store, nor really does the wonderful Borders on 18th and L have any store discretion that's visible in its FOS. I find this a little depressing. I can remember back 20 years when a Borders had character. Of course, there weren't 500 stores back then. And one of the problems the chain had was that it had too much character and not enough management. And I wasn't very happy with George L. Jones because he didn't run a tight ship. But the nostalgic part of me wishes the chain could be a well-run chain while still retaining some of that store-specific character.

B&N will soon have Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion back on shelves. Should have been there all along, but that's a long story. Maybe I'll tell that story in a blog post some day. That was one of the nice things to see in the stores. The bummer thing is that Borders is underordering on Peter Brett's Desert Spear, around half as many of those as the new Robert Redick hardcover, though I bet Peter will outsell the Redick by about that same margin.

It's soon going to be $8.30 for a one-day pass on the DC MetroRail system. Is it that long ago this was a $5 bargain?

As I get older I get more crotchety about my hotel rooms. I went down twice to ask for a new room because any of the ones facing the air wells on either side, the HVAC equipment at the bottom of the airwell, all that noise just shimmies up the walls. Which leaves a room facing the street so you can get the street noise as the "best" option. I probably won't race to book the Hilton Garden Inn on 14th St. again.

I've never seen so much snow in DC. Knocked over light posts and paper boxes. The sidewalks not so bad but at the corners where snow was plowed from two different streets, you had some interesting detours.

The Pizzeria Uno in Bethesda is closed. And right before I headed to DC, my younger brother told me the one in Manchester, CT is closed now as well. I enjoyed my dinner at the Union Station location. I tried the honey crisp chicken salad for the first time, along with that new moroccan lentil soup, and it was a good thing.

Whole Foods is about to open the new store in Chevy Chase, MD just over the border from DC in Friendship Heights. May 18, I'm told. That's just a little over a mile from the Tenleytown store in DC and not far from the River Rd. location in Bethesda, so I see some same-store cannibalization in the near future. And it's maybe but three years ago that the Tenleytown store was given a pretty major remode. I also see on their web site that the store in Lake Grove, NY will be opening on March 17.

With my little weekend trips the past two weekends when I've been considering myself as on vacation and able to do more than just the Sunday Times crossword, well, I've impressed even myself with how well I've done on the Saturday puzzles. They're not easy, and it takes some backing and forthing and fermenting in the back of the mind while I do other stuff, but I've been very pleased.

I just can't seem to get as much done on a weekend when I'm home.

#200!

So here is your fearless blogger, posted nattily in front of Borders #118, Thousand Oaks, CA.  Which opened on November 18, 1995, and which on August 10, 2009 became the 200th Borders superstore visited by yours truly.

27,854 square feet, located in a former bowling alley.

That sign next to me is an old-style Borders "cafe espresso" sign.  This is one of the few Borders in the country (the store on Park Avenue & 57th St. in Manhattan is another) not to have been converted into a Seattle's Best cafe, generally due to lease restrictions of one sort or another.  However, while the NYC store is a real time-warp location that maintains its ancient Borders cafe look, this store serves Seattle's Best coffee products but without the food goodies and general look and feel of the Seattle's Best cafes.  In fact, it currently serves no food at all.  So it was kind of half-retro.

I celebrated this momentous occasion by purchasing two bags of Lindor truffle balls to leave for the store's break room, and the new issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.  Which I'll probably never have time to read, but I wanted to get more than just a 45¢ truffle ball at my 200th.

More posting on my recent trip to the LA area TK, as I dig out from accumulated e-mails and such.

getting there

The past couple of years for my London Book Fair trip I'd taken Eos to London, one of the three business-class only airlines across the Atlantic that went belly-up from late 2007 thru summer 2008, Eos just a couple of weeks after I got back last year.  This year I flew business on Delta, choosing them largely because they were offering a 5PM flight back for the price other airlines charged for the 10AM return from Heathrow.  The late departures are very popular with the road warriors who can do a full day of business in London and then head home and the airlines charge accordingly (though now it looks like they're happy to take less money than you might think any time of the day or night; I'm checking American right now and finding what a year ago would have been shockingly low prices if I wanted to go back to London in June).

Delta seems to have taken lessons on schedule updates from Amtrak, which has this nasty habit of pretending that a NYC to DC train won't be delayed because the same train coming down from Boston is running 35 minutes late, and so it was that even though Delta 001 is a continuation of a flight from Orlando albeit with a change of planes for the Florida passengers, Delta pretended that the scheduled 90 minute delay for the flight from Orlando would have no effect on our departure.  Not until we got to the airport 2 hours before, and then just after we've checked in they finally decide that yes, the incoming flight really will be late and then push our ETD back by 90 minutes.  I am assuming they were waiting to see what time the flight actually left Orlando so they'd know more precisely what time we would be able to leave JFK, but unless they were willing to strand all the switching passengers in NYC if that flight was really really really late, wouldn't it have been nicer for them to have admitted sooner that whatever time we left, it wasn't going to be on time?

Delta has two shabby old terminals 2 & 3, so I was happy to find out that even though we checked in at terminal 2 that the Heathrow departure actually left from the nicer and newer international terminal 4 (you could go thru security at terminal 2 and take a shuttle across the tarmac), which has more shopping and eating and long wide concourses that are good for exercising.  I used part of the "unexpected" delay to walk around outside, and was glad to discover you can actually walk between terminals 1,2,3,4&5, which is the new Jet Blue terminal. I did not have time to walk the far end of 5 to see if the path continued onward.  I have no idea if or how you could walk from the terminals to the rest of the world thru the spaghetti of access roads, but at least I know there's this walking route for outdoor exercise if delayed in the future. I did have time for my first in-person glimpse at an A-380 jumbo jet, with one of Emirates parked beside terminal 4.

Eos used the Emirates lounge, which Eos termed the best in NYC, and they may well be right.  It had a full hot buffet and lots of space.  The Sky Team lounge in terminal 4 had only a soup and two hot dishes, though both of those were at least tasty, and then some cold stuff and the usual plentiful array of beverages and etc. etc.  Not at all bad, but not Emirates.

Delta did its best to board the passengers starting at JFK so we could welcome the people moving over from the flight from Orlando, many of which seemed from the accents as they slowly filtered in to be families from South Africa who had been visiting Disney World by way of Heathrow and JFK.  The last of them got on maybe 10 minutes after our announced delayed departure time, and we got lucky to the extent that we had a very short taxi time (either a smooth day @ JFK or we were now leaving after the peak evening taxi delays) and no circling once in London and were less than an hour behind getting to London.  This was my first time doing normal trans-Atlantic business class instead of the more first-classy Eos.  I couldn't really get comfy in my seat for sleeping though it was large enough and reclined near flat, perhaps because as my assistant Eddie told me later I didn't take advantage of the leg extension part of it.  The food was OK.  The one thing I really missed from the much larger personal space on Eos was a cubby near my head to put some stuff in for the flight, so you don't have to unbuckle to reach the seatback pocket or a stowed briefcase beneath the seat that's a decent difference in front.  The passport control line was rather longer than I'm used to in London, but that meant no waiting the other side for the luggage.  Since we were staying in west London I decided it would be about as quick to take the Picadilly line for not very much money as to take the Heathrow Express for rather more money and then still have to get along to the hotel.  Other than having the heaviest rain of the day exactly during the walk from the tube to the hotel we arrived in OK time, and I pressed a little on getting rooms that were ready and for me on my preferred side of the hotel so we could freshen up and get to work.

To Live and Die in LA, Part 2

The one thing I couldn't do on a car-less visit to LA was head out to the suburbs to visit bookstores.  So I decided on this visit to pursue a costly but pleasant alternative, hiring a media escort to join me for 8 hours of exploration.  What is a media escort?  When an author goes on tour, the escort is the person the publisher hires to meet an author at the airport, get an author to the hotel, to the event, to any media that might be planned in the market, and as time permits to do drive-by stock signings at stores besides the one where the event is taking place.  Ann Binney was recommended to me by Tina Anderson, the wonderful publicist at Penguin who recently, and sadly, departed after offering a lot of assistance to Charlaine Harris and other authors of mine.

We agreed to meet at the Mission St. stop on the Gold Line light rail, so I started the morning walking from the Marriott to Union Station to catch the train.  I went a few blocks the other way to walk along 7th St., and then north on what was called "historic Spring St.," one block east of Broadway.  There aren't really enough signs on historic Spring St. to explain why it is, just one that I found on the north end that mentioned that it was the Wall St. of the West, and which spoke about the historic buildings still on the street.

The light rail arriving at Union Station with the morning commuters was standing room only with hardly room for another passenger.  A little less crowded in the reverse direction, and a pleasant ride up.  After carefully considering whether to add bookstores in the San Fernando Valley or in Orange County to my tally lists, I'd decided to do the OC, in part because it seemed like unfinished business from two years ago when I'd been in Anaheim for WorldCon without making it a relatively short distance down Harbor Blvd. to do the Costa Mesa bookstore thing.  So we headed South, starting off at the Borders in Cerritos, and then along to the B&N in Orange, the B&N and Borders in Tustin (stopping at the Whole Foods in Tustin for lunch), the Borders in Costa Mesa, the B&N and Borders at/near South Coast Plaza, and then the B&N in Huntington Beach and the Borders on Bellflower in Long Beach.  Almost all of these were stores I'd never been to before.  The Borders in Cerritos was relocated from my prior visit in the late 1990s, which was also the last time I'd visited the Long Beach Borders.  The Cerritos store is a very low volume one, the Long Beach one a prosperous one where authors of mine have signed, and the B&N in Huntington Beach clearly the f&sf leader of the stores visited.  In fact, Brandon Sanderson will be signing there in October, along with stops at Dark Delicacies and the Borders in Torrance.  But the most enjoyable and pleasant of the stores we visited was the South Coast Plaza Borders, where I found huge staff recommendation displays for Brandon Sanderson courtesy of  Jaeson.  Jaeson wasn't working that day so I left a note to thank him for his support, and also said hi to Brian, another big fantasy fan at the store.  Jaeson gets extra kudos from me for being the only bookseller I've left a note for to actually send a follow-up e-mail to me.  Did they not pass the notes along at other places, do people not care?  I just get really really happy when I go to a store where there are big fans for a JABberwocky author.

I hated to part company with Ann. It was wonderful to have someone to share the day, and I can only hope she survived having to hear my stories (rants?) for eight hours.  She dropped me off by the Century City mall, after the usual song-and-dance where people from car-based cultures like LA refuse to believe that I really mean it when I say I'm perfectly happy to be dropped a block or two away from my destination if (as here) it means it might help the driver to speed on her way a little more quickly.  I was very pleased with the day because the goal had been to have me at Century City at 4, and we managed to do pretty much everything I'd hoped to accomplish on the day while going just a very few minutes long on our schedule.

I met up with my client Jeff Gelb at the Century City Borders, and he was kind enough to then take me to the B&N in Westside Pavillion en route to dinner and a bookstore at the Borders and Whole Foods adjacent to one another in El Segundo, followed by an after-dinner visit to the Manhattan Beach B&N and then the Borders and B&N in Torrance.  Some deja vu on this; the Whole Foods in Tustin and El Segundo are like clones.  The Torrance stores were old hat, but all the others were new.  With six new Borders added, my count is now up to 197 and I'm nicely on target to get to my 200th by the end of the year, which is one of my goals.  The Borders in Torrance is a very very strong store, one of the first superstores in the South Bay and holding up well, and I was quite taken with the Borders in El Segundo as well.  Both meals at Whole Foods were yummy!  It's always nice to spend time with Jeff because we have similar interests, if not always similar tastes, in comics and movies and other things.  He dropped me off at the Redondo Beach stop on the light rail, and I had a long if uneventful ride to downtown on the green and blue light rail lines.  It may actually be somewhat shorter to take a rapid bus line into downtown, but depending in part on if you know the schedule for the bus, which I did not.  But that has fewer stops, and you don't go east to then double back west into downtown.

My plan for the next morning, if I woke up early, was to walk to Beverly Hills along Wilshire Blvd.,, around 10 miles, and I did wake up early and did set out along Wilshire, helped by the fact that my 10:30 had been moved to the next day.  Unfortunately, I got a call that my 11:30 couldn't do 11:30 any more, and could I come in earlier, so I had to give up on doing the full walk and take the bus part of the way.  But the part of the walk I was able to do, from downtown to Wilshire and Western, was a delight.  It turns out there are a series of Angels Walk self-guided tours in LA, and this stretch of Wilshire is among them.  So all along the way there are large canister signs on the sidewalk (excuse me, stanchions, which you can read here) that describe the history and architecture and infamy of some of the more important buildings along the way.  I found myself reading with great fascination about two gorgeous old department stores, one converted into use by a law school, and famous old residences and the Wilshire Blvd. Temple and the Wiltern Theatre and more.  The saddest of all is for the Ambassador Hotel, the once famous and glamorous hostelry where Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and which was torn down to make way for a school.  I'd read articles about this a year or two ago because preservation groups were trying very hard to save it, and I still cannot believe that a way couldn't have been found to preserve more of it than just an entrance pillar at the driveway, which it wouldn't surprise me if it gets whacked "accidentally" by a backhoe before the school is finished.  Well, if I'm ever back in LA I'll have to pay more attention to the Angels Walk locations.

There are 3 varieties of bus running along Wilshire, the regular #20, the Rapid #720, and the Rapid Express #920.  I've read the fancy buses have some ability to hold a green light or end a red light for just a few seconds so they can go along the way a little quicker, and I got on a 920 at Western that made only 2 stops going the 6 or 7 miles to Beverly Hills.  So I did my 11:30 at 10:00, was able to move my 12:30 to 11:30, and then had several hours before the True Blood premiere.  I had lunch at Bombay Palace, which I liked.  A good mulligitawny soup, and a tasty okra dish even if the okra itself was a bit on the tough side.  If my meetings had been on their original schedule I would have combined some walking and some cabs or buses to get to Hollywood for the premiere, but since I had an abundance of time I decided to walk the whole way, compensating in part for the abruptly abridged Wilshire walk.  Alas, this meant I was walking in the heat of the day with the sun beating down instead of doing it before the day had a chance to heat up totally.  But I walked up La Cienega to visit the Borders there and to pop in to the Beverly Center (not worth a ride up four flights of escalators just to get to the mall), then over on Beverly to the Grove and the Farmers Market.  I hadn't been to the Farmers Market since 1979 and was disappointed.  I did buy a scoop of chocolate malt ice cream that was good but not worth $4.  Up Fairfax past a stretch of Jewish and Kosher restaurants/stores (decent hamentashen at Canters), then over Melrose to Golden Apple Comics (a very good store for funny book and graphic novel fans) and then finally up to Hollywood Blvd., over to Musso & Franks for a drinks meeting, by which time I was kind of totally exhausted and spent, and then over to the True Blood premiere which I blogged about a few days ago and which you can read about here.   I thought about taking a cab back to downtown from the premiere but decided to take the red line subway which was kind of the whole idea of the trip; no matter how much money I make I think I'll always be a bus and train and foot guy so long as the body holds up.

Friday morning I woke up, packed, and hopped on the #720 bus from downtown to La Cienega to meet with my client Mayer Alan Brenner, and one of the very first authors I sold (Catastrophe's Spell to Sheila Gilbert at DAW).  Mayer is one of my earliest clients and has recently found his muse again, and has also allowed free download of his earlier books thru Creative Commons licensing, which you can check out here.  We chatted for a bit at La Cienega Park in Beverly Hills, then I walked a half block up for what had originally been my 10:30 on Thursday, then lunch with Randall Rosa, the producer who has an option on the Nightside books, (pretty nifty website Randall has, actually, and if you're looking for a nice french onion soup in the LA area click no further) then a quick meeting with Don Murphy, who has an option on James Robert Baker's FUEL-INJECTED DREAMS.  His office is beneath the sign of the giant Kermit, quite literally.  I relaxed on a shady bench in the lot for a few minutes, reading my newspaper, then took the Red Line out to North Hollywood, walked over to Dark Delicacies, hung out for a bit with Del Howison and Sue Howison, and then Lisa Morton came by and we hung out some more, and then Del took me to Bob Hope for my red eye back to NYC.

All in all it was quite a nice trip, in part because I finally did LA on my own terms and somewhat on my own power.  On my next visit to LA, if I can get to the Valley bookstores from Woodland Hills to Northridge to Santa Clarita and points in between, I will have pretty much visited every major bookstore from Mission Viejo in the Southeast to the far ends of the Northwest, but for now there's that one quadrant to get to.  I hate the red eye and kind of vegged out on Saturday.  I got horribly behind on newspapers and have been slowly catching up over the past week.  It's been nice to have a full week in the office for the first time since the week of  July 21.  

I'd still like to do one more tennis blog.  I haven't blogged much really about my Willamette Writers/Denvention trip.

To Live and Die in LA, Part 1

When I visited Los Angeles two years ago for the World SF Convention in Anaheim, I was fascinated by the fact that I was able to use mass transit to Do Something.  It was a small something, but I was able to walk from my hotel by LAX down to the Metro Light Rail, take it to downtown Long Beach, and visit a new-ish Borders on the beach.  This got me to thinking what I could and could not do if I tried a future trip without renting a car, and I decided to try and see.  And the answer is that you can kind of get away with it, though the occasional cab ride or friend with car of the like is probably still extremely helpful.

Flying in, I went to Burbank's Bob Hope Airport for the first time, and I am inclined to do so again. The pedestrian-friendly airport is around 3 miles from the North Hollywood stop on the Metro Red Line subway, which is not far for a backpacker, not too far for me except it's in the valley, the heat can be high, the sun high in the sky, so it's feasible but not ideal.  Not a long cab ride, of course.  There's a bus that goes fairly straight up to the airport from Hollywood, and other buses that go to the Red Line stop, and there's also a Metro Link commuter train stop one block from the terminal that has infrequent service but could work if you're in downtown LA and can time the trip.  Bottom line is that the airport is more manageable and feels a lot closer to things than LAX.  (Which is also pedestrian-friendly, belive it or not, walk right in off of Century Blvd.)  The airport itself is functional but no more than that.

In this particular instance, I was met at the airport by Del Howison, the proprietor of the Dark Delicacies horror emporium that is around two miles from the airport.  I am the agent for the Dark Delicacies series of anthologies he co-edits with Jeff Gelb.  We hung out at his store for a bit, which has all kinds of things horror from DVDs to books to gift items and more, and since it's the only store of its kind has a great crowd for signings, including some Tor f&sf authors because there isn't a genre indie in the LA area, and is well worth checking out to preorder signed copies by mail from their busy signing schedule.  In fact, my own Brandon Sanderson has a HERO OF AGES signing there in October.   We were then joined by Lisa Morton, a writer and bookstore operator herself, of the Iliad Book Shop a few blocks from Dark Delicacies.  We headed a few blocks down Burbank Blvd. and had a wonderful Thai lunch.  I steered the three of us away from the buffet and toward the combo meal for three, and all the dishes I had were very yummy and way more food than the three of us could have.  The $11.95 per person was very reasonable by NYC standards, though I don't know if it was as reasonable by Burbank standards.  After lunch Lisa drove me a few blocks to her store, which is a large and well-stocked used book store with a very good selection of sf/fantasy paperbacks.  We chatted, I purchased a few books, and then I walked around a mile or so from her store to the Red Line.

This was my first trip on the LA subway.  Stations are large and spacious.  Tickets only $1.25.  But there's no human presence to see in the stations, and I don't like that there's no place in the stations where you can find a schedule for the subway lines or for connecting bus lines at that station.  Not much help if you don't know heading out to Burbank airport if you've got five minutes or 50 minutes to chill for a bus.

In order to do the car-less thing, I decided to stay in downtown LA so that I would be close to the transit hubs, and also because I've never been in downtown LA.  It was around a 25-minute ride on the Red Line and then a few blocks walk to the Marriott downtown.  I had a few hours of daylight after settling into my hotel room and I was determined to explore as much of the downtown area as I possibly could in those few hours.  I walked thru the Bonaventure Hotel, the one with the four circular towers that's a lot look like the one in Detroit, and then thru the main branch of the public library which has many murals and handsome architectural details and is quite a delight, adjacent to a more modern and well-designed wing named after the former mayor Tom Bradley.  Definitely worth a visit.  Visited the Borders Express in the Macy's Mall, then wandered south toward the convention center.  Came across an IHOP open 24 hours, a big Ralph's that's open 5AM to Midnight, all kinds of old buldings that are being converted into lofts and other residences, the Gas Company Lofts a typical example.  A little bit East took me to the gorgeous Mayan Theatre, which is across the street from the historic Herald Examiner building, and from there I walked up Broadway.  Broadway is quite something, a street that was once full of big old theatre buildings of all shapes and sizes, many of which have been carved up into tawdry jewely stores or otherwise of no note other than for the lingering name on the marquees outside.  In one, a video game arcade was put into the once opulent grand lobby of a theatre building, with the upper level walkway around the lobby still lingering somewhat ghostly overhead.  A few of the buildings are still in use as theatres for special events or concerts or the like.  It was all far more Bladerunner than you could possibly imagine, which is not entirely a surprise because the historic and gorgeously restored Bradbury Building that was used in the movie holds court at the north end of Broadway.  And I do mean gorgeous, stunningly and gloriously so.  Happily, the building doesn't hide from its Bladerunner fame.  It has a poster on the walls regarding its use in the movie, and does invite people to explore the lobby and to walk up to the first stairwell landing to take a look around.  I wish I were alive when Broadway was in its fullest splendor, but I still found myself captivated with it on many many levels.  Just a few short blocks away took me to the historic Los Angeles Times HQ, which has a nice lobby with a revolving globe that's a kind of mini of what you find in NYC's Daily News building on 42nd St.  This is also open to the public, with the lobby area serving as a kind of mini LA Times museum.   This is across the street from the LA City Hall, whose grand staircase has been used in LA Confidential and many other movies, and a couple blocks from the CalTrans HQ building, which got a lot of architectural notice but which I liked less in the flesh than in the reading of the architecture reviews about it.  There's a tiny underground shopping mall nearby that still has a B. Dalton with the old-fashioned script sign on it that should probably be a historic site itself.  There are so few B. Daltons left in the world, fewer than 75, and not so many of them with the old lettering on the sign which brings back fond memories of when a B. Dalton was big news, like when one arrived in the Orange Plaza mall near my hometown in the 70s.  From there I walked past a historic old hotel building thru a park and in to LA's Union Station.  This has some nice architecture, but is horridly dysfunctional if you want to do things like find a map or a transit schedule or a bus map or other things you might want to find in a central transit point.  Way at the far end there are theoretically timetables for the bus system by the Metro Link ticket windows but almost all the slots were empty.  If you go all the way to the far end and up to street level there's a Metro Customer Service office, but it's only open 8AM to 4:15PM Mon-Fri, and all the timetables are in the office and not in an a anteroom or something that could be accessed when the office was closed, and when I went back the next morning they did have timetables but a system map had to be requested at another window around the corner.  And believe you me, the LA system map isn't a fun thing to look at on your computer.  In fact, the entire LA Metro web site is pretty bad.  It works if you want to play with it exactly in the way they want  you to play with it, planning a trip from point A to point B, but it is almost useless if you want to just see where you can go and explore from your living room.

But I am digressing!  The nicest waiting area in the train station is off limits to the public, but if you want to rent it out for filming or a private function your wish is their command.  There are a couple courtyards that are part of the complex for pleasant outdoor waiting in a historic setting.  But while I'm not so uncaring about my surroundings as to want train stations to look like Penn Station in NY, I would happily have traded some of the architecture for a train station that was more functional to me as tourist wanting to explore LA.

From there I ascended Temple St. to the cultural complex with: the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, the opera house where the Oscars were often held; the recently renovated Mark Taper Forum playhouse, where I toyed with checking on a ticket for the 8PM of House of Blue Leaves but decided against because I would probably have just fallen asleep since it had been a very very long day; the Ahmanson Theatre; and the Disney Concert Hall which, like the Caltrans HQ, impressed me less seeing in the flesh than reading about in the reviews or seeing in the Get Smart movie.  You could look down the hill at city hall, and across the street the LA Water Dep't HQ has wonderful fountains on the roof of its parking level that you'd almost think were a grand park leading to the Chandler.  I sat on a bench between the fountains and the Chandler for a few minutes, resting my legs and watching the sunset while debating the existential question of whether to Blue Leaves or not.   And then I headed back to my hotel room, vegged for a bit, found some strength to walk a bit to the IHOP for some double blueberry pancakes and 2 scrambled eggs, and then kind of collapsed happily in bed at the end of a very long and very interesting and very good day.

Taking the High Road

So that's me, looking very British I must say, taking the High Road in Layer-de-la-Haye on the English Country Walk I took during my London Book Fair trip.

This was serendipity at its very best. Whenever I travel, I think it's always nice to touch base with Persons of Interest in the areas I'm visiting. When I discovered that David Wenk, the webmaster for Peter V. Brett, lived in London, I decided it might be nice to try and hook up with him on my UK trip, and then to make things more interesting I found out one of the other hats he wore was that of running English Country Walks, which is oddly enough exactly what it sounds like. You go out into the English country, and you go on a walk. I like very much to walk, and I think the country is a very nice place to visit though I wouldn't want to live there, so this sounded very enticing. Not a sure thing, since I have only so much free time on the trip. I don't know if I would have gone on the walk if London was full of theatrical offerings I was just dying to see, which it wasn't. Or if the wonderful screens on the West End had been overflowing with movies I'd love to see on a huge screen for the bargain price $29.50. But neither applied, so meeting up at Liverpool Street Station at 9AM on a Saturday morning seemed alluring, and I have to say the walk was all and more that I could have hoped for.

There were six of us total. There were two expats who worked for Bloomberg, and the siblings Hal and Sue from the US. Hal was on his first trip outside of North America, in spite of doing IT work for a travel agency, while the others were fairly well traveled and I believe veterans of the English Country Walk experience.

Our first stop, around an hour's train ride from London, was in Colchester. The vending machines at the main-line train station, where we transferred for a short ride to the downtown station, are not to be trusted, and if you try and take a picture of one because that's the new way of writing down the phone # to complain about your lost shillings (I would have done this the old way), you might be thought a suspicious character. As to Colchester itself, it calls itself England's oldest recorded town and was one of the original Roman settlements. Near to the train station one finds St. Botolph's church, with centuries old ruins adjacent to the current and still-functioning church.



That's me walking thru the ruins.

It's then a short walk to the main Colchester bus station, where we had a short wait for the bus to the Colchester Zoo. Next door to the bus station, a cultural center is being built, and would you believe that there are people who are upset because a government building is over budget, behind schedule, and of no practical use to anyone? That's what we were told.

We didn't actually visit the Zoo, but rather went there pretty much just to add distance to the walk and appetite for our lunch. We paralleled the road the bus had just taken us on along a footpath to some ancient Roman ruins that really aren't. Someone has the exciting job of maintaining lines of stone that mark where once upon a long long time ago there was a Roman temple and a Roman ampitheatre, and where an ancient Roman statue of Mercury was once plowed up and given over to the Colchester museum (which is near the bus station and St. Botolph's but not part of our itinerary). Sadly, I can't seem to find the picture of yours truly orating some Shakespeare on what once upon a long long time ago would have been the stage of the Roman ampitheatre.

From there we meandered a short way thru the woods to Layer-de-la-Haye. Along the way we met up with the UK equivalent of JROTC cadets doing some "wilderness" training. An honest bunch; they wanted nothing to do with our map. As we exited the footpath right before the pub we found some adult troops waiting on the cadets at the checkpoint. My lunch was an OK steak and ale pie with the first of two disappointing hard ciders I had on this trip; does anyone make a good hard cider any more?

After lunch we continued our walk past an old mill, past my first encounter with a foot turnstile that helps keep the footpaths to people actually on foot and able to put a leg up and over, through country lanes and adjacent to pastures and horsies, and along a narrow footpath adjacent to the Abbeton reservoir. We took a brief snack break, took the footpath across a military training field, ascended the hill past the crows to St. Andrew's church in Abberton, and ancient Anglican church that creaks of age from its every pore but is also fully functional, complete with the CCTV that is everywhere in the UK and posted right inside the door the fee schedule for life cycle events that you can find here if you're thinking of getting married or buried at the Church of England anytime soon. Hal took this
nice picture of the church.

Leaving the church we walked a bit further along to the second of the four pubs included in this walk. I'm not much of a drinker, so I leafed through the local free newspaper which had lots of ads and not so much news while the rest of the group partook. We then had a nice walk through a hilly farm area between Abberton and Fingrinhoe were we saw lots of cows like the ones Sue photographed which are pictured above.
(well, these cows were actually a little earlier in the walk, but the ones we saw here looked pretty similar) and along to pub #3, which is across the street from a 700-year old oak tree. Sue took this photograph of her brother Hal nestling in its very broad trunk, which took me 28 very good size paces to circumnavigate. You can see for yourself that this is a really really really big oak tree, and I wouldn't want to be the one who has to pick up the acorns when they fall.

With the sun starting to set, we embarked on the final walk, through and along a tidal marsh, with the footpath ending at the Rowhedge Harbor, which had been very busy when it was one of the only ports open when the unions were striking during the Thatcher years, but now looks very desolate. A few blocks into town we arrived at the Anchor, the final pub stop of the day. Our friends from Bloomberg had to get back to London and cabbed back to Colchester while David, Sue, Hal and I chowed down on dinner. I had the tortellini. We then walked a few blocks to catch a bus back to the main line station in Colchester, where we had a short wait for a train back to Liverpool Street.

This was a day to treasure. I had great weather, and the other people on the walk were great company, and neither can be guaranteed. But the totality of the experience is something you really can't have just anyplace; I can't conceive where or how I'd duplicate the totality of experiences anywhere by me, that's for sure. And it's an experience I'd heartily recommend. The only drawback to me was that the day went a little longer than planned, which left precious little time to read the Saturday newspapers, so I got behind and had to work to catch up. If you're heading UK way, there's only one English Country Walks.