I mentioned in my coverage of Friday that I’m feeling tired, and that is even more true today. I fly home tomorrow (Sunday) and then back to the day job on Monday morning. And work has NOT been that quiet of late, lots of unusual extra work going on that my boss and staff have been handling over the last month, mostly without me. It’s time I dig back in. Friday was a late night for many attendees, I understand, and things lasted until the wee hours. I was not part of those shenanigans, I am old and boring. And I don’t know anyone, nor do that kind of thing anyway. I digress.ture weeks.
I confess, I would like to stay for parts of Sunday. Or at least, I should say, if I was still here, and I had any energy left, I would do two of the agenda items. There is a set of panels left starting at 8:00 a.m. in the morning and another set at 9:30, and I didn’t get a chance to really hone which of the first four would have made my pick out of six nor which of the three of six would have been my pick at 9:30.
Instead, I packed Saturday night, barely managing to fit everything in the carry-on, and just went to the airport on Sunday morning. En route to the airport, I discovered that the Saints were playing that day, AND that it would have been really easy to get tickets even at the gate, no scalpers involved. If I had known that previously, I would have extended my stay until Monday and bought tickets in advance. Just to go to a game. I wasn’t disappointed though, I was ready to go home. Two hops and I made it around 7:30 p.m.
I survived Bouchercon 2025. I’ll let the dust settle before I decide what to do about future years.
My cold is proving more manageable with antihistamines kicking its ass temporarily, and it should keep me going until it’s time to go home on Sunday. If today is Friday, it must be day 3 of #Boucheron2025 in New Orleans! You can find my conference-related musings on my PolyWogg site at https://polywogg.ca/day-3-of-boucheron2025-in-new-orleans/.
At the lunch break, I came back up to my room momentarily, mostly to use the washroom and mentally regroup (it is REALLY loud in the lobby area). But I went for a quick stroll to grab some food. According to Google Maps, there is supposedly a McDonald’s less than two blocks from my hotel. Except I was pretty sure that I had walked that street area before and didn’t see one. Now, it supposedly closed at 7:00 p.m. that night, so potentially I didn’t notice it, but really? How do you miss a McDonald’s, closed or otherwise? There’s gotta be a big M outside, right? Anyway, I have been a little bit too reliant on eating at the hotel, and I confess that the price of food in New Orleans at any of the local restaurants or the hotel is higher than I expected. Many of the rates are higher than Canadian prices, before the conversion. It’s taking a bit of the fun out of the trip, realizing I’m burning through expenses for food. Even the local markets to get drinks or snacks, or antihistamines, are not cheap. But I digress. I also know that part of my reaction is to the fact that I’m feeling a little conferenced-out today. One of the panelists in another session today basically asked if everyone was tired yet? There was a lot of agreement on that front.
For a mid-afternoon break, I wandered down to the lobby and OMG, they were serving SNOBALLS. So, it’s basically a snocone in a cup, and I love anything with crushed ice, from slushees to simple drinks to snocones. I wanted blue raspberry but they only had that in a premixed alcohol format. Yes, there are tons of snocone things all over NOLA, and most of them are alcohol-based. I settled for Strawberry for a mid-afternoon refreshment. I felt like I should be sitting on a verandah somewhere rocking in a chair.
After my last panel, I came back upstairs as my cold was sucking my energy, and I literally fell asleep for three hours. I knew I was tired, as I had to force myself to stop yawning at several points, but I didn’t realize HOW tired. I skipped Murder Mystery Almost Dinner Theatre hosted by Heather Graham with a cast of mystery authors putting on a soft whodunnit, mostly cuz I hadn’t decided if I was going or not — one of the guaranteed social interaction events that I suck at anyway — but I ended up sleeping well past the start of it.
Let the good reads roll…I’m a bit conferenced out. There were times today when I had my introvert response of “Ewww, people.” It’s time to wrap it up and go home. Is it cheesy to say I miss my wife and son? Oh well, I’m cheesy, nice to meet you.
I had a bit of a rough night with my cold. I woke up around 3:00 and I was really congested. So, I decided to take an antihistamine. As an aside, because of my diabetes and obesity (hey, a two-fer!), I can’t take most cold meds that are decongestants. I learned that the hard way about 15 years ago when I went to see a clinic doctor for a potential ear infection, only to find out my ear was fine — my blood pressure on the other hand was 162/105 or so. Heart attack and stroke territory. Because I had been maxing decongestatant with a stimulant in it. Oops. My BP had never been really problematic before, maybe a little high once in a while, but not alarming. On decongestant, I was JACKED.
In the day-to-day stuff, this generally only presents a problem if I forget to take some meds OR I get a cold. Cuz then there isn’t anything really good to take. Antihistamines help, but they dry my nasal passages out a little too well, and then I start wheezing or occasionally coughing like I have a speck of dust somewhere in my windpipe. With a strong gag reflex, we are starting to get into territory nobody needs from me.
But I took the antihistamine at 3:00, fell back asleep until 9:30, and finally woke up like I was doing a zombie walk the night before and the special K hadn’t left my system yet. Not that I know what that’s like, but as a wannabe writer, I’m imagining it with artistic license.
Anyway. I needed to hook my energy with some yogourt and a fruit cup before tackling the conference. You can see my full-day conference-related annotations on my PolyWogg site at https://polywogg.ca/day-2-of-bouchercon2025-in-new-orleans/. There were events still scheduled after I decided a quiet evening around the hotel would likely do me better.
I grabbed a simple burger, read for a while, picked up some snacks and drinks as well as more antihistamine tablets, and then sat down eventually to write my blog entries for the day.
Today was Opening Day for Bouchercon2025 in New Orleans, and my first Bouchercon ever. The commute was easy as I’m staying at the same hotel as the conference.
I am fighting a cold, so I ended up sleeping in the afternoon for three hours, and missed a few panels before going back to the conference. Closed out around 8:30/9:00 and I grabbed some dinner in the lobby, came back to the room, and called it a night. Just in time to write this post and the conference one.
Back at it tomorrow for Day 2. I’ve got better meds for tomorrow, so I’m hoping to be in better shape with more endurance. I’m a lightweight conferencer, apparently.
I’ve always wanted to go to Bouchercon, all the way back into the late ’90s and I was in various writers groups online. It just never seemed worth it enough, as my writing hobby is mostly blogging and will be so until I retire and have more time to devote to it. And even then, there are a bunch of non-ficiton pieces at the top of the writing to do list.
But I’ve trying to think ahead, “prep” my retirement, and this year’s Bouchercon is in New Orleans. The Big Easy. And a destination that has long been on my bucket list. I pulled the trigger back in late Spring and registered, booked flights and reserved the hotel. I was in.
I was trying to keep the arrangements simple, and I booked with Air Canada from Ottawa to Chicago, and then Chicago to New Orleans. On the return, I had the same connection. There were options through Toronto and Washington, but Washington’s times were odd, and for Toronto, I wouldn’t clear customs until Toronto. If I went Ottawa to Chicago, I could clear customs in Ottawa. All good.
Almost immediately, Air Canada threw me to the wolves. Within days of the booking, they changed the time of my outbound flight by a few minutes and my return, plus switched me entirely to United and United Express. There was a small tweak to one of the elements, something with baggage or seat bookings, as I recall so in effect, they changed the price. Other than the days and the routings, everything changed. No big deal. I had a 4 hour layover in Chicago that I wasn’t too happy about, but whatever.
I just got back from another trip with the family to BC. I couldn’t worry about the New Orleans one too much in advance, other than to plan to do it only with a single carry-on rather than checking any luggage.
This past week, I got the Air Canada app set up with Andrea’s help, and my stress started to rise. It is a REALLY long time since I travelled on my own on a plane. So long in fact, I can’t even reliably think of when it was. I think it was before Jacob was born, come to think of it. Wow.
Anyway.
So the app was flagging things all over the place about my flights. Namely that there had been multiple changes to the flight times. Which I knew and didn’t worry about. And the app didn’t like them. They wanted me to log into my Air Canada account and accept the changes. Except there was no place I could find to say, “Yep, all good.” Whatever, I wasn’t complaining about them, I was fine with them.
Except when I went to check in to my flights on Sunday, Air Canada said “Nope, you have to check in on United”. Okay. When I pulled it up on United, it said, “Hey, we can’t pull up your reservation as there are duplicate flights. If you booked with a travel agency, call them; if not, call us.” Except it wasn’t really “call them” so much as try chatting with them.
I tried chatting. It’s an AI-driven virtual assistant at the start, asking me for my confirmation number, my eticket number and my last name. Only to tell me that I should checkin online or use their app. I had to tell it to transfer me to an agent three times before it did. Then 20 minutes online for them to tell me they couldn’t do anything, talk to Air Canada.
Sigh.
Called Air Canada, and actually made it to a real person in about five minutes. Nice. Okay, so they go through, tell me about all the flight changes since I booked, I say yes, they finalize it all, shows up in my app all perfect, no flags. So I should be able to check in with United immediately.
Nope. Same problem. I fought through chat agent algorithms and eventually got to a live body who basically told me that I should contact the travel agency “Air Canada” and get them to reissue the ticket.
In United’s defense, they were showing my return at 10:25 a.m. even though Air Canada was showing 9:40 a.m. So legitimately, it wasn’t lining up.
I called Air Canada and got Nick. Bear in mind that I am now less than 18 hours from boarding and in the midst of packing. Nick couldn’t solve it, and he even reluctantly called United to work it out between them. They couldn’t fix it. But he assured me that if I went to the airport on Monday, they could fix it at the airport manually.
Yeah, I’ve read lots of posts online from people who had VERY SIMILAR problems and lo and behold, it was not easy to fix manually at the airport nor even clear if Go Jet, United, or Air Canada was the one to fix it. AC told me United; United told me AC.
My stress has entered the chat
I was not wanting to go to the airport in the hope they could work it out. It would have just stressed the absolute f*** out of me. So I got to thinking.
Weren’t there OTHER flights that I had not chosen because of routing, times or whatever?
“Hey, look, Nick. I see there is an early morning option to fly AC-only through Toronto to New Orleans. And similarly coming home.”
Yep, he saw it. And since he could treat it as a schedule change, he could rebook me all the way through the trip on AC only. Done. Goodbye United.
Oh f***. I was leaving at 6:00 now, meaning up at 4:00, at the airport for 4:45 a.m. Crap. Well, sleep was overrated. I made it, everything went swimmingly in Ottawa. Interestingly, there was a flight to Toronto that left while I was in the gate area and nobody asked us if we wanted to go early (they did for ours as there was lots of room). I thought about asking, give me more time in Toronto to make a change, but nah, it’ll be fine, right????
I got to Toronto, my new departure was also in Terminal 1, all good, right? RIGHT????
Right, 90 minutes between flights. With walking a mile or two it seemed to get to security, where they decided that we were doing FULL security without any of the bells and whistles that makes it easy at Ottawa now. No, this was old school. Shoes off, laptops out of their bag, CPAP machine out of its bag, separate bin for my carry on, etc. I had 5 bins go through the scanners and then it took me almost 10 minutes to reassemble everything back to where it needed to be. I am NOT looking forward to the return, but I’ve got way more time.
Then I had to clear customs who wanted to know why a government guy was going to a writing conference without a business visa. HOBBY was the key word they were looking for, fyi.
Then 12 more corridors and I really NEEDED a bathroom. No choice at that point.
Got to the gate finally, second last one to board — which was stressful except for the fact the flight was half-empty. So they had boarded REALLY fast. After takeoff, I moved back about 10 rows, nobody in front of me or behind me, easy to recline seats, spread out on the seats beside me, etc. It was great. We also picked up tail wind or something, and we arrived at least 30 minutes earlier than expected.
I texted Andrea as I finished various “stages” and sent some early pics of the Big Easy on landing.
Then a VERY long trip through the New Orleans airport to get to the exit, with another bathroom stop, only to find out that apparently NOLA doesn’t like taxis??? There were about 10 different signs up for various types of transport from the airport, with NO indication at the first 9 where taxis might be. But I found one, $40 and 25 minutes later, with a swing by the Superdome, and I was at the hotel.
Then I got a really nice surprise. I was supposed to get here around 7:00 p.m. at night, but I was now here at noon. I arrived at the hotel a few minutes before but there were a couple of guests ahead. I assumed I’d have to drop my bag and go wander, but no, they had a room of my type available. Sweet. By 12:15 p.m., I was in my room, and unpacked even. Seven hours ahead of schedule.
I have Monday afternoon now, plus all day Tuesday, and some of Wednesday morning before Bouchercon 2025 starts.
This is my home for the next week. Let the fun begin!
