Last weekend we hosted the 2026 TAFF delegate, Kat Templeton, on her way to Eurocon. I’ve linked to the explanation of TAFF, but short version is it’s an annual fannish crowdfunder to help a fan travel across the Atlantic. I met John while he was on his TAFF trip, so obviously we are quite fond of it. It’s also a sort of lifelong community sort of thing, people who win TAFF tend to be involved in it for the rest of their lives.
There had been some discussion about going up to Edinburgh on Saturday, the city is a direct ninety-minute train ride away and makes a nice day trip. I’ve been through on my way to Edinburgh airport a handful of times, but only played tourist once, so I spent a couple of hours looking up nerdy things to visit (lots!). In the end it turned out that Kat had worn out her poor feet traipsing around London with Alison and co., so we stayed in Newcastle – but I put all my Edinburgh research into the map for future use.
Kat arrived on Friday evening, and we had a few people over, including previous TAFF candidate Alissa Wales. On Saturday we had a nice breakfast in the Ouseburn and then caught the Toon Tour bus, which is your classic hop-on-hop-off deal – we’d only just heard about it recently and it was the ideal way to get a little tourism in the most relaxed way. It’s a nice little route that takes about an hour and goes along the Ouseburn, through the Quayside and city centre, up to the Civic Centre and then back down to Ouseburn, which some local history along the way. It’s not as intensive as similar ones in Edinburgh or the like, but it’s also just ten pounds. Just the convenience of a 24 hour ticket that lets us avoid the hills and hop between the places we want to show visitors means we will definitely be using it again to show folks around.
After riding a full circuit, we stayed on till Monument, in the city centre, and alighted there in order to visit Travelling Man, where John and Kat both bought some games while I browsed the books and comics, and pointed out anything with a drawing of a cat on it to whoever was nearest. It was a warm day, so we followed that with an ice cream sundae at Mark Toney a couple of doors down, and then went home for an afternoon for boardgames and some chilling out time before getting Square delivery pizza for dinner and chatting about Northern California fandom past and present.
It was a lovely visit from our perspective, and after the full schedule of activities preceeding it in London, and the whirlwind of countries and conventions (Eurocon and Finncon!) to follow, I hope it was a good little reset opportunity.
