We Went To ALA And Had A Blast!

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Many of you probably know that we went out to Boston last weekend for the ALA Midwinter Conference.

If you haven’t been to ALA, a little about it… it’s the American Library Association midwinter meetings. The conference is geared towards librarians and it’s really their event, but as a blogger, we’re able to purchase an exhibits pass and get on the conference floor and wander. Last year we attended this event in Chicago and had a blast. It’s a lot more lower key that BEA can be and I like that we get the chance to calmly wander the floor and chat with the different publishers.

We ended up staying in the hotel attached to the conference center and I think that was the best decision we made all weekend. We were able to go back and forth to the room pretty easily.

We arrived in Boston on Friday and ended up heading down to Newbury Street to meet up with Gaby at Trident cafe and books. We had breakfast for dinner because yay breakfast and then headed to Brookline for J.P.Licks and an author event that included Annie Cardie, Emily Martin, Laurie Elizabeth Flynn & Marieke Nijkamp. We got to wander around a bit downtown and saw the outside of the public library and some really cool buildings.

Saturday we were up early and in line at Starbucks so that we could head into the conference hall when the doors opened at 9:00am. We pretty much wandered all day and then took it easy that night… we had some much needed relaxing and getting ready for the next day which started again at 9:00am. We attended the We Need Diverse Books panel featuring some amazing authors *cough* Adam *cough* and were lucky enough to get some seats … it was so packed in there which is an amazing thing!

Monday, we headed down to the conference hall again for a little bit, but just to do a quick wander through because we had set aside this day to wander the city of Boston – even though it was only in the mid-thirties, we had sun and pretty much the whole day to see things! We started at Faneuil Hall and checked out The Quincy Market for lunch… then because we wanted to see so much, but didn’t have more than the day, decided to get on a trolley and tour the main attractions the city had to offer. We saw tons of amazing things and you can see them in the pictures here!

When it was all said and done, we headed home on Tuesday morning and despite flight delays made it at a somewhat decent hour. Plus we had tons of books to sort through and get organized. I think we’re just starting to feel like we are getting back to normal… except for this stupid cold I’m fighting!

So once we sorted through what we had, we had some copies of things that we wanted to use as a giveaway! One lucky follower – US ONLY will win this stack of super anticipated books that are arriving this year!