A Trip to San Antonio and the AWP: the Travel Portion

I am drinking a peppermint mocha at a table in the lobby of the Rivercenter Marriott in San Antonio, Texas.  We need a better word than lobby, frankly.  This area is huge, and the check-in desk is almost not noticeable; it's off in the corner, overshadowed by the lush furnishings.  Well, they're like an industrialized version of lush furnishings.

I did wake up early, and I've spent more hours than I should, upstairs in my dark room, reading Super Tuesday results.  Unlike previous years, my grad school friend and I couldn't find a suite--hence the dark room.  I think for subsequent mornings, I'll come down here to write.  There are tables where I can plug in my laptop, and I can bring headphones to drown out the piped-in music.  Maybe I will treat myself to a peppermint mocha every morning.

It reminds me of the first national academic conference I attended, a pop culture conference back in Chicago in 1994.  We stayed at the Palmer House Hilton, a hotel where my grandfather had stayed when he traveled for his jewelry business earlier in the century.  A different grad school friend and I shared the spacious hotel room, and we began each day with a coffee concoction and a scone--delightful!  The room was so big that it had 2 bathrooms.  I wonder if those kinds of rooms still exist.

Yesterday was a fairly easy travel day.  I got to the airport 2 hours early, because I had luggage to check, but because I was so early, I had no trouble.  The security line wasn't long, but it was VERY slow.

I got an exit row seat on the first leg of my trip, from Ft. Lauderdale to Houston.  On the plane from Houston to San Antonio, we each had our own row.

I saw 10 people wearing masks. Of course, I don't know if I should count the woman with her mask dangling from 1 ear like an odd earring, the guy wearing his mask to cover his chin but not his mouth/nose, or the guy wearing the construction mask, the kind you wear when you're doing a bit of sanding.

I was deeply aware of every cough, sneeze, and sniffle.  But I usually am aware of those things.  I'm not exactly afraid of germs, but I am a bit leery of all body fluids that aren't inside the body.  Coming of age during the discovery of the AIDS virus will do that to a person.

I was also aware of the kindness of people.  The sight of children who weren't traveling together but who put on some sort of puppet show with their stuffed animals and the top of the airport seats as a stage made me happy all day.

I got to San Antonio and got into a cab, like I was some sort of adult on a TV show who does this all the time.  I got to the hotel, which had not lost my reservation (always a pre-travel jitter of mine), and even better, they let me check in hours early.

I spent the afternoon in a combination of scrolling through various sites, doing grading, exploring San Antonio on foot, doing some more grading and scrolling, and then going to the local CVS to buy contact lens solution.  I managed to get here with my contact lens case, but not the solution.  Happily, that's an easy fix.  It would be a much longer week if I had gotten here without my glasses that I use to read the computer when I don't have my lenses in.

Like Portland (Oregon) and San Diego, San Antonio also has a disturbing number of homeless people--people sleeping/passed out on sidewalks, ranting on sidewalks, lurching along almost falling into traffic. I know that South Florida has lots of homeless too, but I think they have better places to hang out than in our center parts of cities. Or maybe they're there too, but I don't know it, because my daily life doesn't take me there.

My grad school friend arrived in the early evening, and we explored the Riverwalk a bit.  But in the end, we came back to the hotel for a dinner of sorts.  All of the other restaurants seemed to busy with the noise of music (both live and piped in) and crowds.

I'm not sure what to expect from the AWP conference.  All afternoon yesterday, I saw writer after writer on my Facebook and Twitter feed decide not to go.  I am assuming that there will be canceled panels and appearances.  I will make the best of it.  Maybe unlike other years, I won't be so overwhelmed by all the options.

Or maybe we'll just have lots of time to explore San Antonio.  As we thought about our dinner options yesterday, it was not lost on me that we had a lot of chains to choose from--honestly, I can eat at a Margaritaville just a mile from my house.  I didn't come across half a continent for that.

If the rain lets up today, maybe we'll find some parts of San Antonio that are more authentic.  Maybe we'll explore the Alamo--we can't get much more authentic than that.