Trip report 1 -- Saturday 2nd-Wednesday 6th
Nobody knows all of this story but me. Parts of it are common knowledge, and other people know parts of it, but this is the story of a journey I took alone. It's my story, and yet it isn't a story at all, it's the truth. It isn't the whole truth though. There are other people in this story, and I learned long ago that telling the whole truth where other people are concerned is usually a terrible idea.

Traveling alone is different from traveling with other people. There's nobody there to encourage you when things are difficult, nobody to share jokes with, nobody to stay with the stuff for thirty seconds, but also nobody to irritate you and distract you and complain when plans change. I always like travel books best that are written by somebody venturing out with no companion. This was the first long trip I'd made alone for a very long time. I am good at travel, even though I don't do much of it. It's like one of those skills you put points into in character creation and then never use in play.

I set off from home on the morning of Saturday August 2nd, 2008. Rene, my next door neighbour and next year's Worldcon chair, drove me to the station. He did this because he's a very nice guy, but also because I was carrying a bottle of ice cider and a bottle of maple whisky for the post-Hugo party. He figured out that if he got everyone local to carry a litre of alcohol, nobody would have to pay duty.

I got to the station in good time, and onto the first train, the Adirondack, which left at 09h30. I had ribs with me from CoCoRiCo and bread from Premier Moisson and water from the tap. The US border was no problem, with already having a visa. After the border the train runs along Lake Champlain, and it's lakeshore and trees and distant views of Vermont all the way to Schenectady, where we came in about an hour late. I was supposed to have two and a half hours to wait, but it turned out to be just about an hour and a half. It was long enough for an enormously pregnant kate_nepveu and orzelc to come down to meet me. We went out of the station across the road and I had some sweet potato fries and iced tea in an Irish pub. We had a good time hanging out and talking, then we went back into the station and waited for my next train, the Lake Shore Limited.

The Lake Shore Limited is an in-between train. It's an Eastern train, not a Western train. It has only one level and no viewing car, but the seats have leg-rests so people can sleep. I started off at Schenectady with two seats to myself, but at Rochester a church group of teenagers got on, and one of them sat by me. A different one got in trouble for getting off to smoke at Toledo in the middle of the night (it's always the middle of the night in Toledo) and they kept running up and down the aisle and teasing each other. I ate more ribs for supper, and more again for breakfast. We made it into Chicago not very late, and I met up with ashnistrike and Cally and Nameless quite easily.

This was Sunday morning, twenty-four hours from home. Twenty-four hours is a long way. America is big. You probably knew this, and so did I, but now I really know it down to my bones.

We went to the Field Museum, which has the most awesome exhibit on evolution you might ever want to see. They have a Burgess Shale animation -- like a fishtank but with Burgess Shale creatures -- and lots of dinosaurs. They also had an exhibition of mythical animals which was great. I wished Z was with me, because he'd have loved it. I felt slightly guilty for having taken him to the Art Institute last time we were in Chicago. Then we went back to ashnistrike's house and ate some delicious salmon and hung out and talked. Then I slept in their spare bed, which was wonderfully horizontal. I spent the morning online, and then chatting, and then picking up some brie and soft pretzels and grapes in Trader Joe's for the next stage of my journey.

Chicago Union Station is practically the only real station in America. This is an exaggeration, but it's one of the few stations that has lots of trains leaving all the time and they're not mostly commuter rail. Denver station, for example, has two trains a day, the California Zephyr once in each direction. Chicago Union Station feels like a great Victorian railway station. It feels like a hub, and it is a hub. Unfortunately, it's the only hub Amtrak has, which is odd, when they have such a large country to run trains in. I've mentioned before that they're not running a system, only trains. Their trains are great. Their system is... weird.

The California Zephyr is supposed to leave Chicago at 14h00. Only they call it 2pm. Among the other things Amtrak don't have is 24 hour time. This is especially weird in a company running trains that run west for three days before getting to California. Denver is about half way.

Trains west of Chicago don't have power outlets. Well, let's be specific, they have one, in the middle of the observation car. They have an observation car. They have a dining car. They have ice water in every carriage. They're very very comfortable, and they have a top speed of 80 mph.

Illinois has more cornfields than I can quite believe. I was starting to get worried about all those barbeques and popcorn machines, when someone I was chatting to explained that they use maize for oil, for fuel and for high fructose corn syrup. We came to the Mississippi, the border between Illinois and Iowa, in the early evening. It had flooded, and there were a lot of flooded cornfields, with some broken flooded houses. I hope all the people whose houses they were are safe with relatives and have good insurance. We crossed the Mississippi with some children daring each other to spell it. ("You said pee-pee!") I stayed in the observation car watching the sun set over Iowa (more cornfields, with some soybeans) and writing my acceptance speech for the Prometheus Awards.

The California Zephyr was full, every seat taken, which meant that when I left the observation car for my seat and discovered that my leg-rest didn't come up, there was nothing to do about it. I slept very badly. I had breakfast in the dining car with kinzel and rolanni, who had a sleeper and were very comfortable, and we got into Denver about three hours late. cem met me at the station and showed me the way to my hotel on the free bus. In the hotel, I had a shower and napped all afternoon on the bed that was horizontal and not moving anywhere.

I woke up in time to wander through the Hyatt lobby to see if I could find anyone wanting dinner. I saw a number of people, but they all had plans. I had a great conversation with Robert Silverberg, who was on top form. There's going to be a French film of Dying Inside, and not only that but it's being reprinted (by Tor!) along with The World Inside. He has no objection to my characters discussing it in ILE. I also saw autopope and said hello. I went and grabbed a burger by myself, then went back to the hotel where beamjockey and Kelley were just arriving. I went out again to watch them eat dinner, and we ran into foms.

Wednesday I was up early, had breakfast and hung out awhile before Registration opened with Tom Whitmore, this year's fan GoH. Then I registered and we hung out some more and checked where everything was going to be. I had an 11h30 Tolkien panel and a 13h00 reading, and had a panic when I found out that my reading was scheduled to be in two different places at once, and dashed around from the green room to Ops trying to get that sorted.

The Tolkien panel was pretty good. David Louis Edelman is an incredibly smart guy. (N.B. Must read his books.) We talked about reading LotR before they were all out, and before they were a phenomenon in the US, and before The Silmarillion was out, and we talked about the pirate editions and the phenomenon, and about reading them as kids. Ed Meskey on the panel and Wombat in the audience actually remembered the pirate editions and all of that. Pretty cool.

I went to my reading very unsure that anyone would be there at all, and found about 20 people. "You must be the most organised people in the convention," I said. amberley went off to get me some water -- Denver's a mile high. I had no altitude problems at all, probably because of coming on the train, but I had a terrible time with dehydration. Fortunately, the con gave everyone water bottles, or "fan hydration devices". I read the first chapter of Half a Crown, and then the first chapter of ILE -- which remains untitled. Everybody loved it. I mean they quite enjoyed Half a Crown, but they loved ILE. Look for it from a Tor near you sometime next year or the beginning of the year after. It'll have a title by then. Maybe Fairies and Librarians.

Then I went to find elisem to see if she needed any help, and hung out at her table for awhile. At 14h30, or a little before, I headed down to the room where the Prometheus Awards were being held. I saw Harry Turtledove there first thing, and we decided to grab some dinner together with his family a little later. Harry's such a nice guy, and so interesting to talk to. Then they had the awards, and I gave my speech. It was pretty much the speech I wrote last year and posted here, but I did add some specific stuff -- the line I worked on was "I've had a lot of disagreements online with Libertarians about such things as a national health service and handicapped parking spaces. But you giving me this award clearly shows that when it comes to some very important issues, our hearts are in the same place." I also mentioned being the first woman to win it. It's a very fine ounce of gold, with the word "Liberty" written on it, affixed to a plaque with details. Very cool. Afterwards they took photos, and then offered to take us to dinner -- but at 19h30, which is very late for me to eat, and too late for Harry, so we declined. I can't find any of the photos online, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. So Harry and his family and I had a nice dinner, and then I went to the Scandinavian party, where I met up with hittite and (briefly) radio_telescope and some other friends. Then elisem dragged me off to the bar to hang out with the Viable Paradise crowd, which was lots of fun. I got to bed at a reasonable hour.