Clean Knickers and a cup of tea

Or why I may never leave Kate Walker's house . . .

Greetings to all from the other side of the pond where the sun is shining and all is well. While I was taking a shower this morning, Kate brought up my clean laundry and a cup of tea, so I came back to my room (shared with Sid the cat) to lovely clean clothes and a sustaining brew.

I could get used to service like that!

Seriously, we have had a great time.Sid has made me most welcome (he's crazy about his Greenies). Flora the floozie has been swanning around showing off her birthday presents. And Dylan, also a greenies fan, has deigned to come have ear rubs every evening.

We had a wonderful time with Michelle Reid and her husband, prowled an old churchyard at a priory near to them, and then drove back to Kates across the Yorkshire Dales. It's very tempting to set a book in England.Who needs these 'exotic' Mediterranean locales?

I'm off today for Sophie Weston's where I will meet the pyrate in her life, her Maine Coon, Tom Kydd. And then we are off to France.

I hope to download some pics when at her house (or in France) so stand by!

On my way . . .

I'll be heading off across the pond on Thursday. I've been getting bags (well, one) packed and unpacked and the things I'm taking whittled down. I hate heavy luggage and I always pack too much.

Fortunately Greenies don't weight much. So Sid and Flora and Dylan, Kate Walker's cats, are going to get lots of treats. I couldn't go see them without the requisite Greenies.

Ever since the late lamented Bob Redford Walker discovered Greenies, they have been at the top of every packing list I've got.

I haven't done as much on Christo as I'd hoped to do this past week. I'm going to be working on some family history articles, too, and so I spent plenty of time going over the catalogue for the Cornwall Record Office to be sure I used my time there wisely.

There's never enough time -- so I need to make best use of what I get.

Consequently Christo has taken a back seat this week. But I expect him to accompany me on the plane. And now that I've figure out how to shut my wireless off, he can talk his head off and I'll type and type and type.

In case you haven't met my friend, the eeepie, it's a great little computer from Asus that has accompanied me on several jaunts this past spring and summer. It's the 900 version with the slightly larger screen than the original.

But it has the same footprint. And it's sooooo much smaller and easier to take along than a full size laptop. I love it. This is its first trip abroad, though, so I'm eager to see how it likes the trip.

My son's Asus eee pc just came back from Italy and had a marvelous time, so I'm hoping Eeepie will do as well.

On the getting things cleared up before I leave, I want to tell Avi that her books went out today. Avi, I hope you get them sometime in the next week (not sure how long it takes to get to your part of the world).

I'll check in and write on the blog when I can get wireless. You should hear from me from Kate's house. And then, with luck, from Cannes. After that, we'll see. Not sure where I'll run into wireless in Cornwall -- at least I don't know how likely it is where we're staying.

Behave yourselves while I'm gone. I'll send pix of the cats -- and anything else I think you'd enjoy.

Here's your friend to keep you company while I'm gone.


Oh, you thought I meant Hugh.

Right. Well, just because you asked --

Are We There Yet?

One of the things about armchair traveling is that you don't have anyone in the back seat saying, "Are we there yet?"

I blogged this weekend on The Pink Heart Society blog about the joys of glossy travel magazines.

And while you can bet I'd take a 'real' trip hands down almost anywhere, there are certain joys to pulling out a magazine, sitting down, putting my feet up and reading my way into the nightlife of Paris or the lure of a honeymoon in Fiji or an island getaway in the Seychelles.

I love reading about almost anything to do with travel. It's the next best thing to being there. And sometimes, given the hassles of getting anywhere today, it's better. Well, maybe not better, but less stressful.

One of my sons, who worked off-shore and overseas for a few years, says still, "I love being other places. I just don't much like getting there."

Amen.

Early on I counseled my kids -- and I continually remind myself -- that 'travel time' is like 'Dream time.' The real world as we know it -- and to some degree control it -- ceases to exist when we travel. We start at home and, until we get where we are going, we're simply at the mercy of forces larger than ourselves.

It pays to remember that when luggage gets lost, planes get delayed or sent to Detroit instead of Philadelphia. It helps when you're entertaining children for 16 hours in the Denver airport because Untied Airlines can't get you on the flight they said you'd be on. Did I misspell something there?

I love my glossy magazines. I love the places they take me that make me want to go buy guide books and book my reservations. I love the people who wander into my mind and say, "I could live there. And you could write a book about me. Let me tell you my story."

I'm doing that in Cannes in early October. Demetrios Savas (Tallie and Theo's brother) has a date with destiny in Cannes. The story -- and a terrific heroine who is going to give Demetrios a run for his money -- appeared when I was reading an article about the film festival there.

Who knew? I certainly didn't when I started out reading that evening.

I'm counting the days.
Every morning I wake up and think, "Are we there yet?"

Filling the memory bank

I wrote a blog piece that will be going live in the morning on July 29 for Tote Bags 'n' Blogs about writers using everything that they experience, witness, glimpse, taste, touch, feel in their books.

Some of those things we set about experiencing deliberately. For example, I specifically watched a professional sand castle building make a life-sized Nissan truck out of sand because he did the same work my hero was going to do.

I spent a day on a Lake Union houseboat asking every question I could think of and taking photos galore so I could write Seb and Neely's story.

I'm going to Cannes in October to do research for Demetrios's book.

But some of what I write about -- most, in fact -- comes out of filtering my characters' lives through my own experiences, my own memories, feelings, worries, relationships. You name it, if it's happened, it's fair game -- which may be why people tend to shy away from writers.

"You're not writing about me, are you?" they say.

No. I'm not. But you might have been with me when I experienced something. You might have seen the same things I did, felt the same way, been upset or delighted or worried just as I was. Such experiences are universal. It's the way readers and writers connect.

How do I know which experiences, feelings, relationships, worries, joys, and family stories will become a part of some book?

I don't.

It's the serendipitous bit of just being alive and living life to the fullest. It's the unexpectedness of experiences that often make them memorable. Yesterday, for example, my sister and I discovered that there were family connections across the river in Grant County, Wisconsin. And so we went exploring there.

We found two of the tiny communities we were looking for. We prowled through three cemeteries. We found the grave of Hannibal Thomas who has, in my estimation, the most genealogically helpful tombstone on record. It gives his birth parish in Cornwall. It gives the date of his birth, the date of his death, his exact age, and tells the date and place to which he emigrated. You can't ask for much more than that.

Not far away we ran across a one-room school with two see-saws, a slide, a tether ball and two outhouses. Right around the bend we happened on an Amish Sunday gathering and knew we'd seen their school.

The kids were as delighted to see us as we were to see them. We got waved at -- and waved back to -- a dozen or more little Amish boys resplendent in their black trousers, pristine white shirts and black vests as they played in the yard. We saw well over twenty buggies lined up in the lane and in the yard.

Will Hannibal make it into a book? Will the school house or the Amish boys or that line of buggies?

I don't know. But the memories are there. The details are emblazoned on my brain. I doubt they'll make it into Christo's book.

But down the road, time will tell.

We've got one more day and a half of "Sister Camp." So far it's been a blast.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I worked my tail off.

I'm still trying to read through all the handouts I got in my government documents and law libraries research course at Samford University's Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research.

They asked for comments on the evaluation, and my main comment was: Give us the handouts a week early. Then maybe we'll have time to read them before the class is over.

It was a terrific week. It gave me lots of ideas for future research and exploration. And it even provided me with a few clues to follow up on research I'd already begun and had thought I'd probably exhausted. Turns out there is a lot more there.

And, of course, I determined that Natalie dropped out of law school. Always a plus. Now I just have to figure out why she would have thought it was a good idea to go there in the first place.

And I need to think about more of the back story. Maybe do some writing. Scratch a bit -- like Twyla Tharp in The Creative Habit. And I'm reading a book by Sol Stein called On Writing, which I've had for years and which I've only dipped into a few times. It looks like a good book.

I've got photos to download -- including a lovely one of Tess Gerritsen from her visit here two weeks ago. And I have a signed copy of her book, The Mephisto Club, to give away, which I will be doing on Friday. Make a comment and get in the drawing for Tess's book.

If you can give me a good reason why Nat dropped out of law school, you get two spots in the drawing.

I noticed that Anne Gracie is blogging on Tote Bags 'n' Blogs today about being a serial killer. She's pretty much a softie, so I think you can take that with a grain of salt. But there's a great tribute there to her dad on his birthday as well, and that's absolutely heartfelt. Check it out.

on the road

I didnt mean it literally when I said I was over my head earlier this week!

Not under water, at any rate.

But it's getting close to being literally true. We are in Paducah, Kentucky tonight, and we've driven through three torrential downpours today, and sat in a restaurant watching a fourth this evening. If we'd dared go out in it, we'd simply have been pounded into the ground by the sheets of rain or blown away.

At the moment I hear thunder and see lightning and there are way more sirens outside than I want to think about the meaning of. Paducah is a really neat city, and I don't like experiencing it this way. And I don't imagine the folks who live here do either.

Ordinarily we make the trip in one day -- but given the fact that coming south we had to ford a river in Illiois that was crossing Interstate 57, we thought a running start would be good so we didn't have to deal with floods in the dark.

That may have been a good move. Or not.

But I have been told that the dogs are well and the house is above water, so I guess we are in better shape than many.

Our eldest son, who lives much closer to the high water than we do, is keeping us posted. We're hoping for blue skies and light breezes and sunshine for everyone.

And for the record, yes, Natalie did drop out of law school. I'm getting my groove back.

When You're Making Other Plans . . .

Fog, that's what happens.

So we are still here -- waiting to go there -- along with literally millions of other people.

Now we are scheduled to go tomorrow afternoon from another airport about 2 hours from here.

That's the downside. The upside is that it's a non-stop to DFW, so provided the plane flies we will not be bogged down in a hub someplace -- or if we are it will be because we've been diverted and that will be a whole new downside we aren't even contemplating at this point.

My theory about airline travel (and any other sort for that matter) is that it's a whole different sort of time entirely. I suppose it's like "dreamtime" -- though not meaning the same thing. It's a sort of "time" which you step into when you leave wherever you're leaving from, and until you get off at the other end, you're in "travel time" and "real normal time" as we know it ceases to exist.

What is "travel time?" Time when you have no control, you can't plan, you are herded about like a sheep (Eamon, where are you?). And all you can do is take along a good book and go with the flow.

Generally I have no problem with this. Today, for example, it didn't bother me a bit to be told we couldn't go. Any idiot could see we couldn't go.

When I get annoyed is when it's clearly a matter of choice for the airline to muck up peoples' lives. Ordinarily they don't.

But last year they did when they knew perfectly well that a three hour late arriving flight the night before was going to mean that the crew couldn't fly at the very early scheduled time in the morning (there's a rule that says they have to have 8 hours between these flights to sleep). So everyone who had a connection missed it.

The airline people knew this the night before. But they didn't bother to tell anyone not to come at the regular time. They also didn't bother to start booking people on new flights until we'd reached Denver where we sat for 16 hours as flight after flight was already "full."

There were any number of ways they could have made things go more smoothly. They didn't bother. And they didn't even seem to care. Fog doesn't bother me. Disservice to customers does. I don't fly that airline as often as I used to. And it's never my first choice. I'm sure they don't care, but I'm sorry they don't.

But I'm not flying that airline tomorrow -- and it's still going to be a good Thanksgiving.