To finish up this year of teaching and travelling, I was invited to teach at Faeriecon East, up in Maryland. My friend Star was kind enough to drive and we started out a little before 10 AM, heading first west and then northeast. In a little space of time, we were slipping into the deep long valley of the Shenandoah. The low ridges flanked 81 on either side and I longed to touch the sweetly-tended old farmlands.
It is a long, long valley and it seems sometimes as though one will never escape Virginia. But at last we wandered through that odd bit of road that is Virginia and Maryland and West Virginia and Maryland again. The road around Baltimore was easy, even at rush hour, and we arrived in a timely manner at the town and the highway where the conference hotel was reputed to lie.
But where was it exactly? In the early darkness, we drove about and finally stopped at another hotel to ask directions. As it turned out, we had by-passed our destination because there were no lights on the sign and few on the front of the building.
So much luggage! Costumes, workshop materials and notes, suitcases, snacks and more and more. We needed two trips with the big brass cart to get everything up to the room.
Unloaded, made pit stops, met with our genial and not-at-all-freaked-out host, Jason Pitzl and prepared to head south again to meet with our friend and colleague. The two witches got back in the car and wended their way to the home of The Morrison. Dorothy Morrison.