Dry Ice Factory

Loncon 3 was my eighth World Science Fiction Convention, and by this time they are beginning to seem a bit familiar. A bit been-there-done-that. Of course this could have something to do with the fact that in my first 25 years of going to conventions, I made it to only three Worldcons, while in the past nine years I've been to five. Maybe I need to go less frequently if I want to maintain the thrill. Familiarity breeds contempt, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and 3/25ths is clearly greater than 5/9ths. Then again, my two absolute favorite Worldcons were 2005 and 2009, which were both part of the recent burst, but the fun of those two was the result of purely personal factors that really had little to do with the conventions themselves.

I guess part of what I'm trying to say up front here is that I anticipated that a London Worldcon would be something pretty special, because of the location in one of the world's great cities, and while from an objective or empirical viewpoint it *was* something pretty special (c.f. over ten thousand total members, which is the most ever for a Worldcon), my personal experience of it was comparable to, say, the Reno Worldcon in 2011, which was the last Worldcon I'd been to. I had a good time, but I really didn't have anything resembling desperate fun. Well, maybe I came pretty close to desperate fun a time or two. Let's see how the story unfolds.

( Desperately seeking fun ... )

[For the previous episode, see Amsterdam.]

Most of my traveling around Europe over the years has been via train, so the idea of a roadtrip by car was something of a novelty. I can't actually remember how we arrived at this plan, but it was probably because we wanted to have a car in France so that we would have more flexibility in our exploration of various little villages in Lorraine. In any event, Kelly had arranged to rent a car in Amsterdam, and because she would be driving through unfamiliar territory, she also got a GPS navigation device. Our drive would take us through four countries in one day, which was going to be record for at least the three Americans in the expedition.

( Ancestral haunts ... )