Category Archives: Travel

New Orleans Vampire Death March

Travel

One year, the Special Libraries Association had their Annual Conference in New Orleans. Library associations have their annual meetings in the summer, and often in warm places. The American Library Association, in particular, has this down to an art form, choosing a toasty locale for its annual conference (Miami Beach, for example), and a cold locale for its midwinter meeting (while Fairbanks isn’t large enough, Chicago is, and its convention center is at least three turnpike exits away from the nearest hotel, allowing everyone a chance to get frostbite).

One year, SLA met in Philadelphia during a heat wave. Philadelphia, as you may know, is basically one step up from reclaimed swampland, situated between two rivers and near the coast. Any time I stepped outside, that shower-fresh look disappeared. Well, this particular year, we traded the swap upgrade to the real McCoy. New Orleans. In June. While I love the Crescent City, I like it best in the spring and fall. Fortunately, the City that Care Forgot remembers air conditioning, so if you’re indoors, you’re fine. Summers here remind you why talcum powder was invented.

I was there with coworkers Juniper, June, Magdelaine, and Brad, and we thought it would be fun to go on a vampire walking tour of Vieux Carré. Several other librarians I knew were going to be on it, too. So we met at the Cathedral in Jackson Square as it was threatening rain. In fact, one person was even wearing a rain poncho and several had umbrellas.

Our tour began promptly at 8:00pm. Our tour guide was quite into the act, both in his dress and his manner of spinning vivid yarns. We were working our way upriver toward Esplanade and, as it was approaching 10:30, Brad lay down beneath a window unit, positioning himself so the condensate would drip directly into his mouth. Between drops, he said he wasn’t up to the rest of the tour, and would be returning to his hotel. After he assured us he would be fine, we carefully stepped over his body and soldiered on. I wasn’t too surprised about Brad, since I know his favorite warm weather destination is Vermont, and didn’t really think about what all this walking in a heat index of 105 or so was doing to my body.

When the tour concluded at 12:30 or so, I knew I wanted to get into my air conditioned room. It was also 1:30 my time, and I needed to be up the next morning. So I hoofed it to my hotel, which I chose for its location near the convention center, but it was in the Warehouse District, about 12-14 blocks from where I was. I stopped by Rouse’s Market, got three bottled waters, and drank one on the way. When I got to my room, I switched the air conditioning from Tepid to Meat Locker, drank the second bottle, and went to bed.

It wasn’t until I had consumed about three pitchers of iced tea the next day that I finally felt rehydrated.

Enjoy the Vampire Tour, but in moderation.

Photo of Juniper, June, and Magdelaine
Juniper, June, and Magdelaine before the tour.
The tour guide
Our tour guide.

San Francisco Walking Tours

Travel, , , , ,

An excellent way to see San Francisco is to walk it. There are several walking tours, some of which are self-guided (such as the Chronicle Books series.) There are titles available for several cities around the world, and they consist of a deck of 50 cards, with a map on one side, and highlights on the other. Each card indicates the difficulty of the walk, so if there are people in your party who can’t handle rigorous walks, you can plan accordingly. As in the case of anything published, there is always the risk that information (such as transit directions to the starting point) do go out of date. The most recent edition was published in 2004, and not only has a new light rail opened since then, other changes have been made to the transit system, so you may want to double-check with an up-to-date SFMuni map to make sure the bus or trolleycoach they suggest you take even still operates. Still, you can’t beat the portability.

Victorian Home Walk is another opportunity. It operates every day, around 11am, but it is the same itinerary. It costs $25, and includes a bus ride from Union Square to a neighborhood you might not choose to go to yourself since it is a little bit off the beaten path. There are no hills on this tour, so it is an easy walk.

One of the most interesting guided tours, however, is a series called San Francisco City Guides. The series was started by the San Francisco Public Library, and has been associated with the Friends of the SFPL for several years, but is now part of the city’s Parks Department. The docents are knowledgeable, the tours are all free, and there are several different tours. For example, in a one-week period, we were able to join both the Alamo Square tour and the Russian Hill tour. (A given tour might only run once every week or two.) They are mostly free — you just show up at the appointed time and go along with the group. These two were, of course, both hilly, but not onerously so.

The nice thing about the guided tours is that the docents can add some history and background. The Alamo Square tour, for example, includes handouts that detail the differences in the various architectural styles that are unique to San Francisco. On the Russian Hill tour, you will have the staircase pointed out that was used in the TV series Tales of the City. In fact, much of the Russian Hill tour takes place you through shared gardens and courtyards, and you wouldn’t notice them from the street.

So rather than just visiting the sites you know about, learn about some of the history of this beautiful city the next time you go.

Alamo Square Victorians
Probably the most photographed set of houses in San Francisco, these houses face Alamo Square on Steiner Street. Many matching houses were built on spec by the same builder.
Staircase on Russian Hill
This is the staircase at “28 Barbary Lane.”

Winchester Mystery House

Travel

If ever you’re in the San Jose area and looking for a unique experience, the Winchester Mystery House may fill the bill. Sarah Winchester, the firearms heiress, left Connecticut after her husband died and settled in California.

Apparently, she was worried that all those people who died on the wrong end of a Winchester gun might cause bad karma, so she communed with the spirits, and was told that, as long as construction never ceased, she was good. So there was continual work done 24×7, with new rooms, wings, additions being added and torn down all the time.

When the 1906 earthquake hit, the part of the house that was already constructed at the time was sealed up and abandoned. Yes, this place is an example of project creep at its worst.

The interior is a maze of corridors, secret passageways, rooms that were never finished, and even rooms that were finished but never used. If you have a couple of hours, it’s worth a look.

Exterior shot of the Winchester Mystery House
An exterior shot of the Winchester Mystery House. Note how the wing on the left just ends abruptly. Once she died, all the construction stopped.

Meet Me in St Louis

Travel,

Several years ago, Aunt Omega and Uncle Howie traveled to visit their son, who lives overseas. Since they lived in western Kansas, about four hours from Denver, it made the most sense for them to travel across two states (and past six cities with commercial air service) to fly out of St Louis. They were probably inspired by what is now the main terminal, designed by Minoru Yamakasi to evoke images of the great railway stations of the time, and dedicated in 1956. It has been under construction ever since.

Even if they could have flown nonstop to their destination from St Louis at the time, they wouldn’t have. One was to savor the adventure of air travel one segment at a time, and two of those many segments involved multiple airports in Montréal.I don’t remember what airport(s) they connected at to get from St Louis to Montréal, but I’m sure it was somewhere in the U.S. or Canada. I know this, because they flew into Dorval, and at that time, only domestic and U.S. flights flew into Dorval, since renamed Trudaeu, and all Transatlantic flights (and Transatlantic flights only) flew out of Mirabel International Airport, Montréal’s airport of the future, which closed in 2004. (That whole sordid tale could be the subject of another blog post, which I will gladly leave to Montréallers to discuss, but it was 30 miles from the city, and Aéroports de Montréal’s maxim was, if you build an airport, ground transportation will follow.)

I recall nothing about their return journey, except for their arrival in St Louis. Their previously arranged ride was missing in action in the baggage claim area, so Uncle Howie asked Aunt Omega to wait with the luggage while he looked for their nephew. I’m sure his primary concern was not so much theft as it was a general fear that construction workers would have walled in the luggage.

Aunt Omega remarked that she had to wait 15 minutes, and in that time, she never saw anyone she knew. Several family members scoffed at that, my mother pointing out that Aunt Omega couldn’t realistically expect to see anyone she knew in an airport hundreds of miles from her home. In fact, my mom added that even though the Little Rock Airport wasn’t that far from her home, she wouldn’t expect to see anyone she knew there.

Of course, the next time my mom went to the Little Rock Airport, she did run into someone she knew. I doubt she told Aunt Omega. To further add to the irony, a few years later, I flew through the St Louis airport myself, making a connection, and ran into someone I knew. She wasn’t from St Louis either, but we were catching the same flight to Boston. Of course, the airport was under renovation at the time, where they had split the concourse down the middle and put temporary buildings that flanked it. It was to achieve an industrial-chic look-ma-no-ceilings look to the place. They hadn’t bothered with Jetways, either, and it was -20 degrees Fahrenheit.

I’ve since run into other out-of-towners in Berlin and New Orleans, all because of Aunt Omega and how we laughed at her.

Lambert-St Louis terminal
The main terminal at Lambert-St Louis International terminal, from the airport’s official website.

Die Mauer (The Wall)

Berlin, Germany, Travel

I visited Berlin in March 1985, and at that time, you would have had a difficult time convincing me that the Berlin Wall and a divided Germany would end anytime soon. Taking the U-Bahn (subway or metro) beneath East Berlin, I encountered darkened platforms at abandoned stations patrolled by East German soldiers wielding machine guns. It seems that the Berlin transit ancestors had not laid out the system with easy partition of the city in mind. The one station still operated was Friedrichstraße, which had a full customs and immigration hall, and was the only crossing between East and West Berlin that could be used by both German nationals and foreigners. (Germans could not use Checkpoint Charlie.)

For my day trip to East Berlin, I memorized the information I needed to know from my Baedeker’s, since Western travel guides and maps were contraband, left my camera in my room (since cameras could be confiscated), and took the S-Bahn (regional/suburban train) over the Wall to Friedrichstraße. Although I had read that the Wall was actually several walls with a no-man zone between them, it was quite an eye-opener to see it.

Once I alighted the train at Friedrichstraße, I went downstairs into the immigration hall and waited in the set of lines for non-German nationals. The immigration officer started with me as he was finishing with the person ahead of me. He scrutinized my passport and me several times over, filled out a visa, and the only thing he said to either of us was, “Fünf Mark, bitte!” I would have believed that the five Marks was the most important part.

When I received my visa and my returned passport, he unlocked the door letting me into the customs hall, where I immediately had to buy 25 Marks in East German currency at the inflated rate of 1:1, even though you could buy 8 or more per D-Mark on the black market in West Berlin. Needless to say, I couldn’t have spent the 25 East German Marks if my life depended on it. None of the Soviet Bloc cities were known for their shopping. I suppose I could have stood in line and added my name to a 20-year waiting list for a refrigerator or something.

Most of the museums were in East Berlin, and it was nice to see them. It was interesting seeing all the Trabants on the street. Most were either white or pastel yellow. The pastel blue ones must have belonged to senior party officials, since they were rarer. Maps posted on the street pretended that West Berlin didn’t exist. Postcards took longer from East Berlin, too. As I recall, it took 6 to 8 weeks for a postcard to make it back to the States, whereas it was a week or so from West Germany.

German reunification was a good thing, but some people who grew up under the old system have a nostalgia for East Germany. Goodbye Lenin is an amusing film set during the fall of the Berlin Wall that came out at about the time that Ostalgie (the German word for nostalgia of East Germany) became a phenomenon. I recommend it.

Sign advising people that there are leaving the American sector at Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie.
In case it wasn’t obvious, you were now entering the Soviet Sector.
chair beside Berlin Wall
One of those “Life goes on” shots.