Malice Domestic

The rest of my trip, I was at Malice Domestic, a mystery convention dedicated to cozy mysteries, which is the kind of mystery I like to read.  I just posted a long post about it on my review blog, so I’m going to direct you over there if you want to read about it.

Instead, I’ll talk here about some of the down points, like my hotel room.  I wasn’t staying at the conference hotel, but instead stayed half a mile away.  It wasn’t a bad walk at all, and I didn’t mind.  However, they have one of those heating options that is either hot or cold, and they’d switched it to AC before I arrived.  My room was cold that first night.  They didn’t turn on the heat again until late in the second day I was there, but it had warmed up significantly before I went to bed, which was fantastic.

The flight home was an adventure as well.  I had two carry-ons coming home, my normal backpack and the bag I’d gotten at registration.  I was trying to avoid having to ship books home.  They plane home was packed, and they didn’t have room for all the carry-ons.  Guess who was stopped when he was boarding the plane for having two carry-ons.  Yep.  So I checked the bag full of books.

That would have been a brilliant plan, expect we hit a huge thunderstorm in Chicago, where I had a transfer.  It delayed us from leaving for an hour, and when I arrived in LA, I discovered that a few of my books were wet.  I had to talk to them to make a claim in that case, which delayed me so much that I missed a shuttle back to where I’d parked my car.  All told, I didn’t get home until 2:30AM Monday morning and had to be at work that day.  Yes, I was a bit slow and fuzzy, but I made it through the day.  And, in even better news, I think my books will dry out without any real damage, so that’s good as well.  They weren’t wet enough to be ruined, but they certainly aren’t in perfect shape any more.

Yes, this is a complaining post.  But really, go see the other post and you’ll see that I did have a fantastic time.  I had some complications along the way, but overall it was a great trip.