One month out
Exactly one month from today, Valerie and I board a plane on the first leg of my 2017 TAFF trip to the 75th World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki, Finland.
Now it's time to start getting antsy.
We now know who is hosting us first. Since we are arriving in Manchester, England on the morning of Friday, July 14th, Paul and Cas Skelton in nearby Stockport have graciously invited us to stay with them for our first weekend in England. After knocking about Manchester, which has a lot of awesome architecture and cool museums, we are handed off to Jim and Carrie Mowatt in Cambridge; three days after that, Val and I go to London, where we will be the guests of Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer.
After that, we are probably going to visit Ro Nagey, who lives near Swansea in Wales. We already have reserved a flat in Paris for four days and nights. Even with all this fairly well set, there is still so much to arrange. Odds are we will be visiting with Kees van Toorn in Rotterdam, Netherlands; Valerie's high school friend, Eric, lives east of Amsterdam (he was an exchange student back in the day), so there is an excellent chance we will be seeing the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Then there will STILL be a few days available before we reach Helsinki on August 8th. We leave Helsinki on August 14th, and we will have five days to return to Manchester to board our flight home on August 20th.
Five weeks in Europe. Hell, if you're going to take a TAFF trip, better make it an epic one.
Just today I received an email with my tentative WorldCon 75 schedule. I can't say what it is yet because it's not chiseled into stone. Right now it's been scratched into silly putty since so much of the programming is still being finalized. Stay tuned.