Sunday

Everybody said the drive to Boston would take eight hours, including directions we generated before leaving. I'd been chirping about how I could drive it in just over six. The train takes three hours and ten minutes to get to New York from DC, and another three to arrive in Boston from there. I add this up as six-ish. I can't remember any time I was unable to outperform slow-ass American train schedules, so I was convinced I'd be able to make the trip to Readercon* this weekend in seven hours. But everything happened wrong. My carefully timed departure, sure to make NYC between lunch and dinner rush hours, didn't account for continuous fifty-five mph speed limits from Baltimore to the Jersey border. Then we promptly missed the proper I-295 exit to the NJ Turnpike (heck, even that legendary speedway was fifty-five down much of its ugly length). So obviously we crossed the George Washington Bridge onto the Bronx Expressway at five pm and slowly inched through Connecticut. We arrived at the Boston Marriott Burlington--hidden behind a bus stop in Burlington, Massachusetts, a tiny suburb north of Beantown--just ten hours and twenty minutes after leaving Falls Church. We had a good time at Readercon, by the way, making new friends* and seeing old ones.* We returned with a number of new books (that number is nineteen), some of which we were able to get autographed. Sunshine even signed something herself: the advanced reading copy of the upcoming Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet anthology, which includes two of her poems. We really figured the Sunday drive home would go much quicker tonight; but nine hours into our eight-hour drive, stuck in Baltimore roadwork just inside the Capital Beltway, we knew we weren't even going to beat Thursday's record. [Cavin]