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Travel: Trip Report: Flying Barges 2
How I Built a Travel Jenga
The pandemic interrupted the orderly flow of annual BookCrossing.com conventions.
Every April since 2004 a city somewhere around the world has hosted a convention to celebrate the anniversary of the site: St Louis, Christchurch, London, Toronto, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Gothenburg, Bordeaux…
I’ve attended most of them, not to mention various more localised “Unconventions”. Each one a tonne of fun with friends and an excuse for travel.
Mainz in Germany was the last one, in 2019, and a couple of we Aussies made a presentation pitching the delights of the 2020 world convention on the Gold Coast.
We had booked the function room at the Broadbeach Surf Club and we were going all out to entice our Northern Hemisphere friends Down Under.
And then Covid. February saw things begin to wobble and in March the borders slammed shut.
End of the dream.
We eventually held a watered-down Unconvention in April 2022 with a single international visitor — from New Zealand — and no more BookCrossing conventions on the horizon.
