Winkie Convention Countdown: 27 Days to Go

I went to a total of four conventions up at Wawona. It's up in Yosemite National Park, so it was a bit of a drive on winding mountain roads to get there. Some of my most vivid memories of those conventions, in fact, are the before and after, getting to and from. After my first convention came Disneyland, of course, and that was a lot of fun. I must take Laura there some day, maybe after a Winkie Convention. The next year, my folks actually let me go by myself on the bus. I was only fifteen, and it was my first real adventure on my own. I did fine until I got to Fresno, and then found that it would be five hours before my connecting bus left. The Fresno bus station is not the most exciting place to be, and it was too hot (at least to a kid from cool and green western Washington) to go out. The next year, my mother took me (I think she drank some more gin and tonics), and after the convention we went to San Francisco and played tourist. I even got to try out some of my fledgling Spanish in the Mission district, where I asked for El Mago de Oz in a bookstore. (They didn't have it, so I got Alicia en el País de las Maravillas instead.) Then after that, in what turned out to be the last convention at Wawona, I went with my friend and fellow Oogaboo, Karyl Carlson (after a few adventures with the bus getting to her place in Oregon). Then came the 1984 convention, in a new location, with a new way to get there...but that's a story for another day.