Lucynda Storey-Erotic Romance Writer

I have been remarkably blessed with the ability to travel from place to place.  I suppose my love for travel started when I was a kid.  My father was in the US Air Force and we moved from Albuquerque to Amarillo to Izmir Turkey to Maine and to Colorado.  My love for visiting new places was ignited.

 

It should come as no surprise, then, that I love traveling for Aspen Mountain Press and for romance conferences and the myriad places those sorts of gatherings can take me.

 

This week I found myself in the fabulous New York that Frank Sinatra sings about.

 

And New York City is fabulous.

 

I stayed at the Sheraton New York Towers where I was treated like gold.

 

This was saying something.  Not because anyone in New York was in any way rude or impolite, but rather that I arrived in less than ideal circumstances.

 

I left Denver on Monday the 25^th.  As soon as I took my seat on my Southwest Airways flight, I received a call to my cell phone that my connecting flight in Chicago had been cancelled due to high winds and other weather conditions.  Thankfully, I was able to reconnect with a flight to Baltimore where an SUV was rented and my partner and I drove to NYC, sans luggage.

 

Again, I emphatically state that no one was rude in any way, shape or form.  Most people bent over backwards for us, doing what they were able; some more than others.

 

Upon our arrival at the Sheraton New York and Towers, we were given robes and slippers, free Internet access and asked if we needed anything else to get us through the basic necessities.

 

Our conference, Digital Book World was pretty much a wash.  The bulk of the first day was spent listening to a lot of presentations that had little to do with actual e-publishing, except for the startling fact that a lot of the illegal pirate sites offering NYT best selling titles got their titles from some sort of in-house leak.  Woah, now that was a shocker.

 

The offerings today were much better, one of the best presentations being on the new blio platform which will offer interactive media as well as full color presentations.

 

But New York.

 

Oh man.

 

New York City is absolutely the top city on my places to visit, and visit often without ever living here; a feat most New Yorkers would be thrilled by.

 

There is absolutely so much to do in NYC that the only way you could even begin to scratch the surface is by returning repeatedly.  Two walks to Times Square, one for a fantastic kosher dinner at Ben’s, and another next door to the Gershwin theater where Wicked is now playing for sushi at Shimizu, left no doubt about the allure of NYC.

 

I’ll admit it.  I’m a gawker.

 

I’m the sort of person native New Yorkers would probably honk at because I stepped off the curb at the wrong time.

 

On more than one occasion I felt like Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone; the street vendors with their wares, the flowers in row after row on street corners, the people trying to give away something. 

Amazing.

 

At the same time I know I could never live here for long.  The congestion is a novelty at first but would wear off quickly.  The allure of culture would be soon replaced by a need to find affordable housing and a job to pay for the shows, the subway, the lifestyle.  Not so much fun.

 

All of which makes NYC the top of my list of favorite cities to visit and never live in.

 

Rest assured.  I will be back and still in awe and still gawking.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.