On the road again: Bouchercon, St. Louis, day 5

I never sleep well before morning airplane flights, and today was no exception. After a restless night, I showered and headed for the airport.

A tornado hit STL a while ago, and they're still rebuilding from it, so the routes through security and to the gates still showed signs of the earlier destruction and the ensuing construction. I have no complaints, though, because everyone was very nice, the Admirals' Club's bandwidth was more than adequate, and the plane left on time.

Lunch in ORD was the usual: a pair of Chicago dogs. These are among the weirder hot dogs, but they're still tasty.

Most of the evening went to unpacking, catching up on email, and so on, as is usual for the hours after hitting home from a trip. No complaints, though; it's good to be home for a few days before I leave again Monday morning!

On the road again: Bouchercon, St. Louis, day 4

The con's big activity for today was the Anthony Awards brunch. Bouchercons run their award ceremonies with speed as the top priority, so the food was buffet-style, standard hotel breakfast fare, which is to say eggs and bacon and sausage and bacon and fruit and bacon and biscuits and bacon. Did I mention bacon?

Where SF Worldcons draw out awards with multiple presenters, Bouchercons have a single presenter announce them all. This year's Toastmaster, Ridley Pearson, did something unusual: He presented the awards in as random an order as he could manage. He wrote each category on a small piece of paper, crumpled those sheets into little balls, and put them in a small jar. The con chair chose the first one, and then winner of each category chose the next category. Nice idea.

You can easily find all of the winners online, but I was particularly happy to see Dana Cameron, one of my fellow contributors to The Wild Side, walk away with the Best Short Story award for "Swing Shift." The same story had earlier garnered Dana the Macavity award, so it was a great weekend for her. My congratulations to her.

Finding dinner tonight proved to take more time than I had expected, because this part of downtown St. Louis appears to roll up the sidewalks on Sunday. We finally ended up at Rosalita's Cantina, which served up far better TexMex food than we had feared we might get. Everything we tried was good, the server was very nice and attentive, and all in all, I'd recommend it to anyone in downtown St. Louis looking for a solid TexMex meal.

Tomorrow, I leave early for a day of taxis, airports, and traveling that will, I hope, result in me being home tomorrow night.

On the road again: Bouchercon, St. Louis, day 3

Let's look at a few pictures.

On the way to lunch yesterday, we passed a building that was boarded up and awaiting renovation. On the boards covering some of the ground-floor windows, someone had painted architectural highlights, like this one.


And this one.


And this one.


The women in these shots are not people I know. I was trying to get the shots, they were walking, and they ended up providing scale. I hope they don't mind.

Where we were hoping to eat lunch was this place, whose name made it irresistible.


Alas, it closed three minutes before we hit it--we were heading to lunch quite late, due to work demands--so I never got to experience the Chili Mac's diner.

Walking late yesterday, just to explore downtown a bit, we encountered the bowling alley at which Bouchercon held its bowling tournament. Yes, a con with a bowling tournament.


You have to admit, though, if you were running a con and for some strange reason had to involve bowling, you'd be pretty darn happy to put it at the Flamingo.

Lunch today was at Mosaic, a fusion place with a more ambitious menu than I would have expected from this area. While most of the dishes we sampled were tasty, and I applaud the chef's fusion goals, I have to be clear on one point: no matter what you put on your menu, these are not frites.


Even with the addition of grated Parmesan and specks of white truffles, you may not call these truffled frites. Truffled housemade chips, sure, but not frites.

I'm glad we've settled that.

Exiting the restaurant, we spotted this rooster sitting outside a second-story window, the fabled St. Louis guard rooster, standing watch over the mean streets of downtown.


Or something.

I'm going with something.

Dinner took us to Stefano's, a little Italian place around the corner from the hotel's outlying ballroom building (this hotel sprawls over three buildings). The pizza was surprisingly good, one of the best I've had in a long time, with all fresh ingredients and a tangy tomato sauce that was simply excellent.

For dessert we tried two variants of a dish that is apparently a local, if not Midwestern, classic: the gooey butter cake. When Jeni's ice creams started selling an ice cream with that name, I thought they had just made it up, but apparently not.

The classic was sweet and definitely gooey.


The chocolate was, if anything, even sweeter and also quite gooey.


Stefano's claims to have won an award for the best gooey butter cake in the area, so I now feel well-schooled in this odd tradition.

Before and after dinner, the con offered live music from writer Max Allan Collins and his band, Cruzin'. They played mostly covers, but the music was fun, the crowd was into it, and I quite enjoyed it. A lovely end to the evening.

On the road again: Bouchercon, St. Louis, day 2

Most of today went to work, so there's not much of note there. Move along.

Lunch was a completely serviceable meal at a local deli, The Edible Difference.

The walk to and from the place gave me time to check out a bit of the downtown. A great many buildings appear to be unoccupied or barely occupied, as if a wind from the depression had blown through here and taken many of the businesses with it. Other streets showed the effects of real estate developers smelling opportunity, with loft-style condos for sale in building after building. The economy has clearly not been gentle with St. Louis.

I was able to catch the Robert Crais interview, and he was quite entertaining. When the questions turned to his work, he was as neurotic as any other writer I know; it seems endemic to the job.

After some more work, we hit the charity auction. People at this con really spend at each Bouchercon's auction, and this year's was no exception: it raised $17K for a local library.

Dinner was a very good meal at a local Peruvian place, Mango. I had not expected to find Peruvian food here, but I was very pleasantly surprised when we spotted this place. If you live near here, definitely check it out.

On the road again: IDF, San Francisco, day 5Bouchercon, St. Louis, day 1

My day began at 4:30 a.m. after less than two hours of sleep. I'm good at living on very little sleep, but less than two hours is hard even for me. I felt sub-optimal all day, though I managed to do all my work, not miss any connections, and so on.

On the first flight, I was lucky enough to snag an upgrade. Unfortunately, the guy next to me was a surgeon heading to a conference at which he was giving a presentation on some refinements to open-heart surgery techniques. To prepare for his presentation, he watched a real open-heart surgery video over and over and over, frequently pausing it to make notes, on his laptop. So, I had over 90 minutes of bloody surgery video running right next to me, unavoidable if I glanced to the aisle to answer a question from the flight attendant or even just to stretch my neck. Lovely. Not the best treat for a stomach running on no sleep.

In DFW, I managed almost an hour of work in the Admiral's Club and then got a Red Mango parfait for the trip to St. Louis, which was blissfully uneventful.

I haven't been here in many years, but it definitely has that older Midwestern town feel. The "Grand" in the hotel's name must apply only to the common areas, because it certainly has nothing to do with the room. The whole place has the worn, tawdry feel of an aging hooker in dresses way past their best days.

I'm also fed up with bandwidth in upscale hotels. The places charge you a ton, and then the bandwidth sucks. That's been my experience in both hotels this trip. If they're going to touch you for $14.99 a day, as this one and the last did, you should at least get a great connection. Cheaper hotel/motel chains provide better bandwidth for free. Very frustrating.

I'm now registered for Bouchercon and hope to be able to attend some of it tomorrow, though right now I have three calls scheduled at times spread out enough that they will control the day. So it goes.