Lunacon 2008: Part 2 (The "Escher Hilton")

Joe Mahew says, in Lunacon Report, "For those unfamiliar with the Rye Lunacon’s Town [sic] hotel, it earned its nickname, ’Escher Hilton,’ with its convoluted, eccentric building design in which one needs a native guide to get from one point to another. Finding anything there for the first time is a sort of built-in adventure game. "

I first heard someone call it the Escher Hilton when I almost bumped into her in the halls, not looking where I was walking because I was too intent on trying to figure out where the heck I was. "Sorry, but this hotel really confuses me," I said. "They don’t call it the ’Escher Hilton’ for nothing," she replied.

It’s not just that walking straight down the hall of the fourth floor and down a few steps gets you suddenly on the SEVENTH floor that was the problem. I can handle the fact that floors 1-4 on one side are called 5-8 on the other. And I could get used to the fact that the lobby on one side is on floor 2, but on the other side it’s floor 7. But the layout is not the usual rectangle of a modern hotel. And even if it were, it’s always days before I can figure out how to get around a normal hotel. It’s hard to explain, but there were angles and shifts and the map had such small print that it was hard to read in the soft lighting of the spacious halls.

But, hey, it’s not the hotel’s fault that I’m directionally challenged. Eventually it started to make some sense, but only some. I guess the good part about it was that I was too afraid of getting lost going to the Con Suite that I didn’t make many trips, which cut down on my snacking

But it also meant that I wasn’t able to make a quick stop at the dealer’s room between panels. I had hoped that I could slip out of each panel a little early, run to the dealer’s room, relieve Phoebe at the Broad Universe table, and meet and greet for 10-15 minutes at the end of each hour. I figured that if panels ended 5 minutes before the hour, I could leave 5-10 minutes before that and not miss too much. But because I couldn’t get the hang of the layout until the last day, and because a lot of the panels ran close to the end (or interested me so much I forgot to leave early), I didn’t make it.

Unfortunately that meant I missed the woman who bought The Old Power Returns! According to the woman minding the table at the time, the woman said she knew me from a long time ago, which makes me doubly sad I missed her! So, if you were that person, please contact me here or go to the contact section of my web site.

Morven