Last year I went to Indianapolis for the Public Library Association Conference – this year it was DPLAFest – the Digital Public Library of America.
I got a university fleet car, and drove down on Friday morning.
The random travel thing was at my first pit stop, I almost crashed into a guy on my way out of the ladies room, while he was on his way into the men’s. By the time I got back outside with my bottle of water, he was leaning against a post by my UW car, having a smoke. He asked if I was from Madison, said his band had opened for Tedeschi-Trucks there. The Sharrows, they’re from Madison, too. He asked if I’d like a copy of the band’s CD. They were going to Nashville for a gig – I think I was talking to the keyboard player.
I planned to leave Madison at about 8:00 AM, and thought I’d be there, easy, by 1:00 or 1:30 – Google said it was 5 hours and 23 minutes. So I’d be at the conference for the last session at 3:00. Well, I didn’t get out until more like 8:15, and there was traffic, and I forgot that Indianapolis is on Eastern time. So I arrived at the conference more like 3:45, since it was a 25 minute walk from the hotel – and only made the last 20 minutes of the session.
But I was there in time for the reception.
My friend Martin had a poster, about the Biodiversity Heritage Library, from the Smithsonian. They’re a DPLA hub and my favorite source of cool images for iPhone wallpaper and all kinds of stuff. I got introduced to the executive director of Europeana – although I didn’t know that’s who she was until the next morning – just thought she was an interesting woman with a British accent. We chatted about image rights.
Martin was too tired to go to dinner. I was rooming with one of my students, Hannah, and we decided to go back to the hotel, and dump our stuff, and catch up on email, and then think about food.
At the reception, some of the programmer types were talking about a brew pub called Twodeep – so we went there, left the hotel at about 7:00. We got beers, but they didn’t have any food – just a pierogi truck out front. We decided to try a burger place called Bru Burger. We put our names in, and it was an hour wait, so we went across to the this divey bar, called the Old Point, where I’d had chili for lunch my last trip to Indianapolis. We sat at the bar, and were pretty immediately accosted by this totally trashed guy, who bought us shots with pickle backs, and a basket of chips. Introduced us to his wife, who was equally trashed. Said the bartender was his (chubby, gay) cousin. We escaped and went back to Bru Burger, and got our table pretty quickly. I had the Bru burger, Taleggio cheese, bacon and tomato jam. One review I read didn’t agree, but I thought the Taleggio was pleasantly melty and sharp, and a little stinky, even against all the other burger flavors. And we split a side of their very crunchy onion rings.
Saturday was all conference all day. I got coffee at the Starbucks closest to the hotel. Seemed like airport prices, $4.14 for my latte, even in my own cup.
There were bagels at the conference when we got there, and box lunches – I had chicken salad. It was all OK – the biggest problem was that the sessions were in the Indiana State Library, and the Historical Society – right across the street – but also at the Library at IUPUI, a 10-minute walk. And if you did not stay within the thematic tracks, there wasn’t enough commute time. I got lost trying to get to Lily Library and missed the first 20 minutes of a session, and it was almost 80°, so not much fun to be lost, and traipsing across parks in downtown Indianapolis, with all the other Saturday tourists.
Dan Cohen gave the closing remarks, and said, “like last night, you’ll self-organize for drinks and dinner”. Which meant, since I’m not one of the cool kids, and Hannah had headed back to Ohio, and I was too shy to ask the Europeana director what her dinner plans were, that I had a bag of chips and an apple I snagged from the box lunches, eaten over my computer, for dinner. I went out for frozen yogurt, after.
Frozen yogurt in Indianapolis – salted pretzel, and double chocolate, topped with coco puffs
I got back to the hotel at about 7:30. It’s an old train station. One side has working trains, while what the desk clerk called the quiet side, when he checked me in, has dry-docked trains that they rent for parties. So there was a loud party – I think a wedding; people singing along to Don’t Stop Believin’. But I could hardly complain about noise at 8:30 on a Saturday. And, to the hotel’s credit, the noise ended precisely at midnight, and the place was silent by 12:15.
I got up and drove to Chicago on Sunday morning. Mark git us tickets to see Carousel at the Chicago Opera House – ooh la la for a Sunday afternoon. Despite the fact that Rodgers & Hammerstein played constantly at my house when I was a kid, much beloved by my voice-major-at-Bennington mother, I didn’t know that Bonnie Raitt’s dad, John Raitt, was the original Billy Bigelow on Broadway in 1945. And I completely forgot that You’ll Never Walk Alone is from carousel. When we came out, it was pouring, and we decided to walk as fast as we could to go eat at Shaw’s Crab House. The entrees came while we sere still eating our salads – an utterly gigantic wedge salad that we split – but we were too hungry to care, and just had the waiter pile it on. We had filet mignon & scallops and shrimp, and Mark subbed a crab cake for his scallops. And mashed potatoes.
