Bermuda

Much of the traveling I do these days is to conferences--mostly literary conferences, now and then an honors conference. Usually I make these trips alone, but when I had a paper accepted for the Society of Early Americanist's 6th Biennial Conference in Hamilton, Bermuda, I decided to take the family.

After several false starts and backtrackings, we finally left Johnson City at around 7:30 on Tuesday night. Because this trip is to be followed up by three nights in Charleston (our annual vacation) we decided to drive to Atlanta and fly out of there. So, after a long drive through the night, we arrived in Atlanta a little after midnight.

On Wednesday morning we got up and took a shuttle from the motel to the airport. We made it through security and found our gate and settled down to wait.

Then my son made a bad discovery. Somewhere between the security area and the gate, a distance of little more than 100 yards, he lost his passport. He wouldn't be able to get into Bermuda without it, so we walked up and down the concourse, asking all the shopkeepers, security and airport personnel. Nobody had found it. The Delta folks announced boarding in 30 minutes, and we still had no passport. The search continued. I got on the telephone with Delta to find out if I could get refunds on our mucho dinero flight tickets, and while I was talking to them--while the plane was boarding--my wife and son showed up with the found passport!

The flight went well.

In Bermuda, we checked in at the conference hotel, the Fairmont Princess in Hamilton. The picture above is from the balcony of our room.

As usual my paper wasn't written when we arrived. My session was Thursday (today) at 1:15, so last night I stayed up late, taking the couple of introductory paragraphs I'd written in Johnson City and expanding them to about 7 pages for my 15-page presentation. I finished at about 1:30 in the morning, slept some, printed the thing out at the hotel's business center, ate lunch with my panel colleagues and participated in the session.

The rest of the week will be made up of listening to papers and cruising around the island.

Nice!