This past weekend was literally Wander the Rainbow‘s day in the sun, as we hit two different book fairs in the blazing California heat.

On Saturday it was the Sonoma County Book Festival, held in Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square. Although I’d been to Sonoma a couple of times (and even wrote about it in this GayCities piece) I’d never been to its largest town.

Most of us associate Sonoma with wine — or for the LGBT community, the Russian River. But Santa Rosa has its own vibe and even its own favorite son: Charles Schultz, the Peanuts comic creator, lived here, and his whimsical influence is felt everywhere: from an ice-skating rink he opened to statues of the iconic characters dotting the square to an appearance by a real-life Snoopy… given that it was 94 degrees in the afternoon, I can only hope this one had air conditioning for its hapless occupant.

Wander the Rainbow had a good run up in Sonoma, attracting attention and selling a pile of copies. But a travel book needs to stay true to its roots, and to that end we hopped on a Southwest Airlines flight — an echo of my first one on the round-the-world trip as it also left from Oakland during a heatwave — down to Southern California for Book Fair Number Two.

Sunday saw me at the West Hollywood Book Fair, held in the park behind The Abbey (a coffeehouse-turned-nightclub that was a haunt for my gang during our L.A. days a decade-plus ago). I roamed the crowd, made new friends, and even caught Christopher Rice (son of Anne Rice and himself a bestselling mystery novelist) in conversation with Matthew Link, co-creator of Columbo.

Monday was supposed to be a full day of postcarding (much like our Postcard Pub Crawl back in June) and scouting out venues for a future event… but at 113 degrees, it was the hottest day ever recorded in downtown Los Angeles and around, leaving me panting, breathless and mostly incapable of doing much of anything. Still, I managed to speak with a couple of venues… for you fans of the book in SoCal, sit tight… an event is coming your way soon!

As night fell it cooled off (though only a bit) and I experienced a California first: in all my years of living here I’d never ridden in a convertible. A friend of my brother-in-law indulged us with a ride in his vintage “land yacht” — I can’t believe they made cars this big back in the day. As we rode through Los Feliz, downtown L.A.’s shimmering skyscrapers were lit up behind a stand of darkened palm trees — an everyday scene for the SoCal crew but for me another magical reminder of why this part of the world bewitches me so — and keeps me coming back.

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