Last week I flew to San Antonio to attend The World Fantasy Convention. I had a great time! I plan on attending next year’s Con in Baltimore. Here’s why:
THE GOOD:
1. Excellent panels like URBAN FANTASY and FANTASY IN TEXAS. My favorite panels featured Bill Crider, Joe R. Lansdale, and Scott Cupp.
2. Speaking of Bill Crider, Joe R. Lansdale, and Scott Cupp, we had a delicious meal at an authentic Mexican restaurant. Scott’s lovely wife Sandi and Joe’s talented daughter Kasey joined us. Great food and great conversation!
3. Unlike the Toronto BOUCHERCON, the book bag was high quality and full of wonderful books!
4. The Wyndham Hotel offered good conference rooms and amenities. Plenty of snacks!
5. Best Dealers’ Room I’ve seen in a long time!
6. The Book Cellar in the San Antonio Central Library (a short walk from the Wyndham Hotel) featured thousands of books, organized by genre and alphabetized. The day I was there, paperbacks were 2 for 25 cents, hardcovers were a buck a book! I bought as much as I could carry back to the hotel!
THE BAD:
1. Annoying people making lots of noise at 3 A.M.
2. The Wyndham bar charging $11 for a half glass (mostly ice) of sangria!
THE UGLY:
1. I was very impressed with San Antonio with its River Walk and Alamo. But each time I left the hotel, I saw packs of homeless people. Very sad.
All in all, The World Fantasy Convention was a fun experience. I highly recommend it! You can check out their website here.
Congratulations, George!
11$ for a sangria – plus tip? I don’t know …
But I remember too the extremely varying prices in drinks in the USA – from 1$ for a beer during happy hour to 5$ or more.
May I ask what you paid for the hotel room? That was one of the crazy aspects of holidays in the USA for me too:
Hotel prices were so extremely variable, sometimes by a factor of five or more for the same quality/type of a room – just depending on the location and the date.
I was in Texas for a round trip (alone, many years ago, after the death of my first wife …) to visit several concerts by my favourite Steve Winwood – but missed San Antonio, well you can’t have it all …
Wolf, The World Fantasy Convention rate at the Wyndham was $149 a night which I thought was reasonable. But $11 for a glass full of ice with a little bit of red sangria is a ripoff!
That room price seems ok to me for this special occasion – and of course you could go straight to your room after having some sangrias – not too many I hope! 🙂
Wolf, I’m not paying $11 for a glass of ice and a little red wine. I love to spend money, but I HATE to waste money!
Sounds good, especially that panel! You can;t go wrong with Crider and Lansdale.
Jeff, Crider and Lansdale should take to the Road for a tour! What a funny, informative pair of writers!
Jackie wants to know: how did you get the books you bought home?
Jeff, my suitcase was half-full going down to San Antonio, but it returned to Buffalo loaded with books! Plus, I carried the World Fantasy Convention bag of books onto the Southwestern flights with me. Great stuff!
Sounds like you had fun. The late night noise is a problem at fantasy and SF cons, unfortunately. An “authentic Mexican restaurant” – so what made it authentic?
I’ve always found the best mexican restaurants to be almost dives. Never fancy, usually in a neighborhood setting.
Rick, I consider chains like TACO BELL to be inauthentic. As Maggie said, the best Mexican restaurants aren’t fancy and are located in neighborhoods, not malls. They feature fresh ingredients and classic recipes.
That reminds me…Jackie had two free trips to San Diego some years ago when working on America’s Choice with other teachers and schools. On the first one, one of the guys (who spoke fluent Spanish) arranged a dinner across the border in Tijuana, so I guess that was pretty authentic.
Jeff, I’ve tasted some great Mexican food in San Diego. Never been to Tijuana.
I won’t eat in TJ Years ago a bunch of us went camping at Guadalupe Hot Springs & ate at a local restaurant I ate only fried chicken and every one else drank the water and ate the food I was the only one who didn’t get sick, some got dysentery
That reminds me of a holiday many years ago at a chain restaurant called Checkers (?) where I had tacos etc – i also got dysentery, maybe because my system wasn’t used to their spices. I heard it from friends to whom it happened in India etc …
However on a later trip I found that the chain had turned into a hamburger operation …
My first two (really great!) experiences with Mexican restaurants were on my first business trip to the USA in the 1980s – first in Washington DC where I had stuff like Guacamole and frozen Margeritas for the first time and then on our trip through the West – from Vegas to San Francisco somewhere near the death valley …
Those fond memories!
I was really lucky being taken to those business trips around the USA – and two of the people who had lived in the USA for a few years told us everything important so on my first holiday trips with my wife I didn’t make the usual mistakes and didn’t fall into any tourist traps …
The only thing I didn’t manage:
Never had the chance to go to a Fanatsy/SF convention in the USA …
Maggie, Mexico holds no appeal to me.
We did have fun in SA didn’t we? And Tomatillo’s was quite good. Not your Riverwalk or Mi Tierra tourist food but true good Mexican food.
Scott, thanks so much for driving Bill and me to Tomatillo’s! Great food and great conversation!