Oh, I'm a Rambler...

::pant pant pant:: I KNOW I'm late and I should have scheduled this post before I left a week ago, but ::pant pant pant:: it's not Monday yet! Did I make it?

And honestly? My REASON for being late ties in quite naturally to this week's theme. What can't I live without? Well, among all the other great things mentioned by my fellow Alliteratis...

TRAVEL.

I spent the week in Hawaii to attend a friend's wedding. And beautiful ceremony aside, the best part of the week was driving around and sighing every few minutes: "I could really live here. I could. I would be okay with that."

I love seeing how other people live. I love getting away from the big resorts and wending into small towns and meeting locals. I spent time relaxing, sure, but I spent the other half of my vacation puzzling out the logistics of how to MOVE there and what I would do once I did. It's like that movie, Sliding Doors: I feel like my life splits every time I travel somewhere and a small part of my brain never comes back to real life. Bad for someone who needs every bit of her brain at all times, but GREAT for a writer.

So I'm back to real life...a little late, but still here. And here's to finding that perfect opening line for the new 1940's epic surfer girl biopic that's been rattling around in my notebook since Thursday.

 

Don't tell me my bidness, kitty. My ideas are GREAT.

My kingdom for a horse

I would have given anything to have my horse in San Francisco.

Don't get me wrong; she probably would have been terrified. It's a very busy city, which scared me at times. I guess it would be more appropriate to say I would have given anything to have A horse in San Francisco. One used to the city.

Why?

Well, mostly, because travel by car, bike, and foot are nigh impossible in that place. Public transportation wasn't actually convenient for us. And there are SO. MANY. HILLS. But a well-trained, well-shod horse?

Easy as eating pie. (I don't like saying "easy as pie" because it implies that making pie is easy. Have you ever made a pie? It's a lot of work!)

It would have made our two days in the city a lot less stressful, that's for sure.

But the city had some great architecture; neat little unexpected pockets of "ooh, pretty!" that kept me pretty well entertained whenever we walked somewhere. At one point, after we managed to spring our car from parking jail, we drove by this massive stone cathedral that looked like it had been dropped from Europe into a neighborhood where I totally would NOT have expected to see it. It had buttresses and everything! Unfortunately, because we were driving, I did not get to take any pictures of it. Yet another situation where being on horseback would have been awesome.

And of course, a horse would have been useless in getting to Alcatraz, where one of the best parts of our vacation happened. But that's a story for another time.

Anyway, I got a lot of exciting news/ potential news while I was on my vacation, which means some great stuff will be coming up on this blog! Stay tuned, Alliterati! I'm back!

Vacation Mode

I'm allllready in it.

Hubs and I are taking a little trip for our anniversary and I can't. wait. I love traveling, but we hardly ever get to go anywhere. And then when we do, we tend to go to the same places over and over again. I wish we could manage to leave the west coast for once, but alas, that's not to be anytime soon.

Still, I won't complain-- California is a beautiful state, and has a little bit of everything. This time, we're going somewhere new-- San Francisco-- as well as our old favorite haunts in Monterey and Big Sur.

I'm looking forward to clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls, sleeping right on the ocean, taking tours of kitschy places, camping under the redwoods, and driving down the gorgeous coast. It's strange how much I want to try something new, and yet, at the same time, I want to go with what I already know. Monterey and Big Sur are where my heart lives, I like to say. And it's true-- whenever the travel urge comes calling, my mind wants to visit those places first. So despite my desire to expand our travel horizons, it would have to be at the expense of a visit to my favorite place on earth.

Which of course leads to the conundrum of the fact that I might find a NEW favorite place on earth if only I'd go somewhere else.

Ah well. One step at a time! I will put on my fancy high heels just once during this trip to try something new, but then I'll slip right back into my old comfy shoes and relax somewhere that feels like a second home.

I still can't wait.

What's your travel style? Do you visit different locales or do you tend to gravitate toward the same spots? Have you ever had a clam chowder sourdough bread bowl in San Francisco, and if so, where is the best one?

Blame all my typos on spotty cruise internet

Hi all!

Just a quick, prescheduled note from yours truly, hailing from a faraway, mostly internetless land: one of the most important things that I can do to improve my writing is just going out and experiencing the world. By land, sea and air! (Or by whatever method allows you to take the most notes.) So go out and do it! Go sail the high seas or have a backyard staycation! Let your mind ruminate on the thousand of ideas out there, ripe for the picking! Does that make sense? Oh, I'm probably too sunburned by now to care. Writing, ha HA!

Have you ever had a WIP idea come to you while on vacation? You know you have. Spill the pinto beans!

Remember to enter all the lovely contests down below! Books are for the reading and sharing and we love to do both here. Mmm...time for another pina colada.