LONESTARCON 3: Put your faith in God and Rand McNally
The convention was fun while it lasted.
Getting there got Adventurous, though.
Driving westward on Tuesday August 27, we managed to miss the turnoff to the Tourist Information Center coming across the state line from Louisiana on I-20. I’d wanted to stop and get a current TX State Highway map, because the one I’ve BEEN using dates back to when Dubya was still governor in Texas: the copyright date on it is 1998. So, at our Wednesday lunch stop between Dallas and Austin, I bought a MapCo highway map of Texas. We had heard horror stories of driving through Austin on I-35, and I had been eyeing this TX-130 road that showed-up on Google Earth as a bypass around Austin. We did not realize until we got onto it that it was a Toll Road, but it WAS a beautiful new batch of pavement, with us and maybe six other vehicles visible on it. YGWYPF, we figured.
Eventually, we got to wondering when the road was going to rejoin I-35, like the MapCo map showed it doing. The mileage to San Antonio kept dropping, but we weren’t seeing any of the usual Development at the various exits, and we WERE seeing toll plazas at the exits.
On the way out the door I had, as a last-second option, grabbed the newly-acquired 2014 Rand McNally Road Atlas off my computer desk and tossed it onto the back seat. Consulting THAT showed that the TX-130 toll road did NOT spontaneously rejoin I-35 [like the MapCo map showed it doing] but instead ran sort-of parallel and off to one side, and connected to I-10 some 30-odd miles east of San Antonio.
BTW: due to having to leave suddenly on Saturday, I never got to do my serious shopping in the Dealer Room. I did not see anything in the Art Show that tempted me to Quicksale-buy it, either. So this stupid map is the ONLY thing I came back from the whole trip with that I-me-myownself selected and purchased, and every now and then [usually when I am more-tired than I realize] that rankles. I suspect I will indulge in some serious Retail Therapy at FenCon, to make up for that.
The Rand McNally has a good inset-map of San Antonio, and I was able to match-up our new incoming vector with my Google Earth imagery of the road network, and figure out relatively easily how to get to the proper exit, and thence to the hotel. We went ahead and put the car in the hotel’s $25/night garage for the first night, and Morris moved it to the $9/night City garage across the street after we had breakfast on Thursday.
Once checked-in, we went over to get Convention-registered, and encountered Stuart and Kittye Herring on the way. After picking up all our bumf, we decided to look for someplace for supper. Fogo de Chao is a Brazilian-style steakhouse. It’s got a humongous salad bar and they rotisserie-grill 15 different kinds of meats, that are brought to your table ON the rotisserie skewers and carved to your specification. For about $65 per plate. So we got our Big Meal out of the way early, and were grateful that there is a Denny’s right across the street and a Food Court in the mall attached to the hotel.
Of course, eating at Denny’s or the Food Court implies hiking back from the Convention Center TO the hotel first, so lunch there was really NOT an option [for me, at least]. I’d brought plenty of granola bars, Fiber One Brownies, and Oreos, however, and I dropped bags of all that into the quilting project bag I was carrying [gotta have SOMETHING finger-and-fiber to work on in panels and concerts, after-all]. There was a “café” in the convention center, where I could get [wildly expensive! and Pepsi-products only!] soft drinks before I discovered the Con Suite around the corner from the filking space.
Back when I thought I was going to be doing LoneStarCon solo, I’d downloaded the PDF of the Pocket Program, and gone through it day-by-day, identifying events I was ON and events I wanted to GO TO. Then I went back through my list, inserting reminders to GO EAT, because the programming grid did not HAVE any meal-breaks built in.
On Thursday I was not booked to be on anything, so we had a Denny’s Breakfast, then headed for the Convention Center for the day’s Programming. Morris and I pretty-much did our own things panel-wise that day, though we both turned up at the same panel in the 5 PM hour. He wanted to see a different event instead of Seanan McGuire’s concert, but we got together again for Leslie Fish’s concert at 7. After that we headed back to the hotel and had supper at Sazo’s [TexMex] in the Marriott before I headed for the 9 PM Themed Filks. I chose the “Browncoats, Cowboys, & Aliens” one, and it turns out that my turning-up there somewhat rescued Blind Lemming Chiffon from being the ONLY Instrumentalist in the room. We stayed that way, too, the rest of the evening, and eventually folded around 11:30 PM.
On Friday, I was the only announced panelist at 11 AM’s “Filk 101” event. Then I encountered Roberta Rogow in the elevator and she asked if I minded if she horned-in on my panel, and I said “Oh, THANK you!” We also dragooned Mark Bernstein up to the front table when he showed up. I had had a large breakfast [at Denny’s again] before my panel, so during the noon hour I wandered the exhibit hall and found myself, along with Blind Lemming Chiffon, circling a GINORMOUS Lego display, cameras busily clicking. We both know Peter Alway, builder of the Lego Dulcimer and the Lego Filk Room.
I took-in Mark’s “round robin” concert slot [shared with Joseph Abbott, this year’s Interfilk guest at OVFF], then went to a panel on the topic of Music and Science Fiction. This one took the viewpoint of the writer, on writing about musicians in an SF setting. I heard Steven Brust’s concert between that panel and the one on “The Romance of Military SF”, then re-encountered Morris and the Herrings, and we had supper at Bar Rojo in the Hilton attached to the Convention Center. I wanted to catch Elizabeth Moon’s reading at 7:30 and lobbied strongly for NOT hiking all the way back to the Marriott and all the way back. Claire McMurray and I selected the A-Capella Themed filk that evening, hosted by Mark Bernstein. I had finally managed to present Elizabeth Moon with the sheet music I’d drafted for her “Absent Friends” song, and I wanted to do that one. After the hour of a-capella work, Roberta Rogow joined us with her guitar, and a bit later Kip McMurray showed up also. I think we folded not too long after midnight.
Saturday, I had another 11 AM panel, this one on “Why Filk?”. It was excellently moderated by Mary Crowell, and also featured Tim Griffin, who I had met at last January’s GaFilk. Mary led us through covering the filk community experience, as well as the filk musical experience. There was another panel right-afterward in that same room, about “Writing About Music & Art”, with panelists including Tanya Huff, Diana Gallagher, Leslie Fish, and Seanan McGuire. After that I headed for the convention center and the concert by Bill & Brenda Sutton, followed by “An Hour with Lois McMaster Bujold” [also featuring Lillian Stewart Carl as the interviewer].
It was about halfway through that panel [around 2:30] that the call came from Morris. I answered it “I am in the ‘Hour With Lois Bujold’ panel” and he said I should come out into the hall and call him back; it was important. This was when the word had just come about Catherine’s indisposition. I’d seen Jordin Kare by the door of the Bujold panel as I left, so I beckoned him out into the hallway to let him know briefly why I had to leave him holding the bag on our shared concert Sunday, then headed toward the concerts-room to see if I could catch Brenda and let HER know. I wound up phoning Brenda, but I saw a couple of other filkers [Teresa Meckley and Diana Gallagher] on my way back to the Marriott after that, and started the signal spreading.
We were packed-up, I had eaten a spare slice of the pizza Morris had had for lunch, we got checked out, and were on the road by 4:45, and calling The Cousin Next Door to let her know we were homebound.
We opted to go straight through Austin on I-35 homebound, thinking “it’s a non-football Saturday; how bad can it be?” Well, there was SOMETHING going-on in downtown Austin that afternoon, because the traffic was THICK. We did not get down to a total stop for more than a couple of seconds at a time, but once we got past the State Capitol the traffic going our direction thinned out, and the traffic going the other way was jammed-up.
That TX-130 toll road collects tolls in a way that is totally new to me. There are no live booth-attendants anywhere along the route, though there ARE booths provided. Instead, there are overhead cameras every-so-often, positioned to capture license plate numbers. Presumably this imagery goes into a system where the plates are looked-up through the appropriate DMV, and bills sent in the mail to folks who aren’t toll-road subscribers. I lost track of how many of those installations we passed on TX-130, at $1.69 each. So we await the arrival of THAT bill with interest and trepidation.