BEA or bust - Part 3

BEA or bust -
The trip to Book Expo 2008

Day 2 - Dallas to Phoenix - 2:26pm

Yesterday we raided a roadside convenience store. The place had to know it was in the middle of nowhere, because it offered an assortment of audio books. Clearly, no one visiting this store could have anything better to do.

Eli and I were excited. There had been a webinar earlier in the day, but apparently you shouldn’t try to attend webinars while in the car using a cell phone based internet system and passing through the middle of the forsaken land. And there was another eight hours to go.

We greedily picked out a trilogy and hit the road again.

After eating our ice cream sandwiches - or rather attempting to drink them before they vaporized in the west Texas sun - we ripped the cellophane off our audiobook set and popped the case open to reveal a glistening new set of ten . . . cassettes.!?!

There is no cassette player in the car! Eli (a complete technophile) says it would be no less surprising if we had opened the box and discovered the book on LP.

Thinking back, all the audiobooks on the shelf were the same shape, which means the store didn’t offer anything on CD. So we didn’t miss something, there was no choice to be made about format. We took what was there and didn’t think that it might not be right. Part of me wants to balk at the cassettes, but another part of me feels compelled to point out that there is no way a CD would have fit into that box. Boy, were we not paying attention. (Again, I mention that I prefer the term ‘savant’.)

Reduced to listening to staticky radio stations when we could find them, we tried not to complain. The cassette problem was truly our fault. And it was also our fault for not checking things out before we got too deep into the back of beyond. So we faked smiles and lied to each other about how much we loved country music from the fifties and Broadway hits in Spanish.

We hit Phoenix just before midnight. Mind you we only made that goal because the earth was kind enough to have us cross two time zones in our favor. So it was really a little before two a.m. our time.

We checked in and one of us showered - I won’t say which one of us and the four frogs of the apocalypse were cleaned. They creaked incessantly to warn us of the coming changes. We did not care.

The frogs are going with us to show visitors to the booth how they orient - just like in the book. It’s all plausible, the magnetic orientation of the frogs that Becky finds, and a lot of it doesn’t even require a polar reversal, just a frog. So these four (poorly named Jordan, Jillian, Becky and David) are off to show what they can do. We would have gotten frogs in LA rather than dragging them out and back, but we have only a limited set up time. So these guys are getting hauled cross country, along with twelve cricket dinners. I swear the hotel room sounds like I am camping out by the back pond. I dream of the polar reversal and the bees beside the 101 freeway.

Luckily, to me, this is restful.