After dinner, Ellen Kushner pointed out we were right by the river, so we walked down to it, and then walked back along the river for a while. Just lovely. In retrospect, I kind of wish I’d taken a little more time to just walk around New Orleans; I had scheduled a bunch of interviews for the SLF, and they kind of ate up all my free time.
Well, and I arrived exhausted, so I spent most of the first day lying in bed reading Ursula Vernon’s _Nettle & Bone_, which was just delightful and the quiet reading / resting time was desperately needed. So I guess mostly, I wish I’d been able to come a day earlier, or stay a day later, but alas, teaching schedule did not permit. I guess I’ll just have to come back to New Orleans sometime. Woe is me.
Though I can’t really complain — I was in New Orleans for AWP many years ago, and I spent a magical night wandering from jazz club to jazz club with a Hurricane in my hand, getting steadily more tipsy, until I ended up at Cafe du Monde at something like five in the morning for coffee and beignets, and then when I walked back to my hotel, it started to drizzle, but it was still warm, so I may have been dancing in the rain a bit, and an older black gentleman was both amused and charmed by me, or so he said, so I did have at least one night of New Orleans magic in my life already.
