What I Did On My Summer Vacation!

 RHYS BOWEN: I have just returned from a short trip to England. It was all very intense as the object was for John to see all his family members.  His sister lives in Cornwall in a fifteenth century manor house (she married into an important Cornish family). Her sons and their families mostly live within reach so we had one big family meal after another.

One of the things I love about being in Cornwall is eating my favorite foods. Cornish pasties:

Cream teas:

The good news is that all calories leave when you pass the Cornish border.

The driving is always interesting as the roads are, well, rather narrow.

One of my favorite excursions is to St. Michael's Mount. This time the tide was up but when it's out you can walk across.

Then we went on to Bath and I spent two lovely days wandering around my home city, evoking memories and enjoying the new spa with rooftop pool. 

In London an extra treat. It was the Chelsea Flower Show and the main street in Chelsea and turned itself into Chelsea in Bloom with every shop doing a fabulous flower display:

As I look at this photos I'm already filled with nostalgia. It seems like a simpler, more sane life over there. 

What are your vacation plans this year? Who is going abroad?

Beach or Mountains?

 RHYS BOWEN: I’ve just come back from two weeks on the beach in San Diego. Absolutely heavenly, (apart from five family members coming down with Covid, one after the other, necessitating confinement to various parts of the house we were renting, masks and eating outside. I find that beach time is something absolutely necessary for my sanity and peace of mind. Walking barefoot on warm sand while looking for shells, standing at the edge of the waves as they lap over my feet, sitting on the sand and running it through my fingers, or just watching the waves all sooth my soul.

When I am in and around water I feel truly at home. This is strange because I grew up in chilly England where the water is usually too cold for swimming and  beaches usually windswept. We often went to Wales and one year my father and I made a bet that we’d swim every day of the vacation. This involved driving the car onto the beach, shedding outer layers while still in the car, then sprinting to the water, gasping with shock as we dove in, sprinting out and back through the waves and then rushing back to the car, teeth chattering.  We did it but I can;t say it was fun.

But these days I love every minute of beach time. Gliding over the surface in my kayak, as the paddle dips effortlessly into smooth water, boogie boarding when the day is warm enough and the ocean not too rough or even snorkeling are all perfect for me. I was never really taught to swim but the moment I put fins on I became a mer-person. When I snorkel on coral reefs I lose all sense of time and place. I am fully engaged with the sea life around me, sometimes I little too fully. Once, in Grand Cayman, I followed the reef out, never looking up, not hearing John yelling that I was going too far. When I finally did look out the shoreline looked as if someone had drawn it with a pencil. I was really, really far out and there was nobody or nothing in sight. Just me and smooth ocean. Then it occurred to me that if a shark took me nobody would even see.  I made it safely back to shore but I have been a tad more careful since then.

I wonder what it is about the sea that draws us so much. In England lots of people drive to the seaside, then sit in their cars watching the waves. I too love to watch the waves at sunset, preferably with a glass of wine in my hand. Why are we so fascinated?  Is it something primeval, reminding us that we all originally came from the sea billions of years ago? 

Are you a beach person or do you prefer the mountains, or maybe you’re a city girl? What is your ideal vacation?

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Water girl here, by inclination, geography and astrological sign. I live by a river, I’m a half hour’s drive from the ocean and I have a dear friend with a lakehouse (thanks, Celia!) Water - seeing it, being in it, hearing it - puts me in my happy place. 

One of the things I love about my pre-knee-replacement PT is that it’s done in a pool! This may be the first time I’ve ever been eager to go to physical therapy and disappointed when it’s done. Forty minutes exercising in that pool makes my whole day.

JENN McKINLAY: Beach, lake, river - even though I’m a fire sign, I love the water. I grew up alongside a river, a lake, and then the ocean in CT. The only reason I can survive in AZ is the time I spend at our beach cottage in Nova Scotia and our annual trip to San Diego. Also, we have a swimming pool. Gotta have water. That being said, I do love the mountains, but water is vacation for me. 

HALLIE EPHRON: Give me water, too. Among my fondest memories are body surfing in Malibu. And I love pools though I’m a terrible swimmer. Hold the boats. 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Beach beach beach. A big umbrella, a little back chair, the pelicans skimming over the water, a view of the vast uninterrupted horizon, a book, and only the sound of the waves. 

(I am not fond of the mountains, except from an airplane.) 

LUCY BURDETTE: count me in as a beach person too, although I’d say it’s more water than beach. Even though I am a Capricorn and deeply rooted to the earth! Our grandkids were here this past week, and they never wanted to get out of the water, spending hours in the Long Island sound and then transferring to a neighbor’s pool as soon as they got home. I am sure they will grow up being beach people. When I went off on a solo adventure after college, I had been planning to land in Boulder, Colorado. But I remember so clearly feeling that the mountains made me claustrophobic.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Beach, here, too! I find the ocean incredibly soothing and love to be around water of any kind. Mountains, not so much. I understand that they're beautiful, but they just don't strike that chord with me. But give me the gentle rolling hills of southern England and I might even give up the beach...

Another Tantalizing Question

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I am laughing too hard. I love Nancy Cole Silverman, she's a true soulmate. But after reading this, I am even more convinced. And yeah. My answer to her question--as benighted and misguided the answer--is yes.

Confessions of an Obsessive Compulsive Wordsmith

By Nancy Cole Silverman

I fear vacations. Oh, it’s not that I’m afraid of flying or strange places or meeting new people. I love all that.  No. My fear is based on something much more mundane. It’s the fear of closing my computer, leaving behind my work-in-progress and detaching from social media. Allow me to explain.

I recently completed Reason For Doubt, the fifth book in the Carol Childs Mysteries that debuted this week, November 6th.  While this is good news, those of us who write know that once we’ve kissed our final draft goodbye, it’s time to start and maybe even complete another project. In my case, I had started a new manuscript, pulling Misty Dawn, one of the reoccurring characters from the Carol Childs Mysteries, and – fingers crossed – submitted it for review to my publisher.

Caught between the marketing for the release for Reason For Doubt, and hoping to hear back from my publisher about the new prospective series, I was, I think, understandably anxious about being out of touch for an extended period of time.

However, my vacation beckoned. A Baltic Cruise. The trip of a lifetime. A much-needed escape for my husband and me, whose schedule is as crazy as mine, and who needed this vacation perhaps more than I did. Ordinarily I’m pretty good at balancing things, and with today’s modern internet connections, travel’s not usually too much of a problem. But, when it comes to cruising, internet connections at best can be iffy. Nevertheless, I determined to soldier on.

Which meant, I’d be doing a tap dance of sorts.  In the back of my obsessive/compulsive mind, I was plotting yet another murder mystery, while in person I was Nancy-tourist, shooting photos and chatting away with strangers about the various ports where our ship had docked.  I flittered from photo shoot to wine tastings and back to tour groups, all the while feeling guilty I wasn’t meeting my daily writing quota or able to maintain my author profile on my social pages or interacting with potential readers.  But, the longer we were away, the more I relaxed I became with the idea that time off might be a good thing.

Soon I found I was checking my email less and less, and my notepad that had been scribbled with notes to myself for some future project I was planning became full of notes about Viking ships, castles, and ports of entry. Ideas for future stories.

Including one about the people of Tallinn, a former part of the Soviet Union, where our ship had docked for the day. 

Tallinn

 Our tour guide explained that on August 20, 1991, the people of Estonia declared their independence from Russia with a bloodless coup.  While Soviet Tanks rolled through the countryside and surrounded the lone TV tower in Tallinn, volunteers from the city gathered beneath the tower and began to sing.  In what came to be known as the Singing Revolution, the country was ultimately granted its independence, and today its citizens maintain they sang their way out of the Soviet Union.  

And then there was a large rock in Denmark, a pink colored

boulder our tour guide pointed out to us.  The rock commemorated the Danes and a turn-coat Nazi who saved the Danish Jews from certain death.

It was these stories and more that I filled my notepad with, and at night after we returned shipboard, that I tapped into my Ipad, exercising my anxious fingers, while I lulled my creative spirit back into its happy place.  I don’t write historical fiction, and may not use any of what I saw or learned exactly as it happened.  But the theme for them will show up somewhere in a future work when I hope to show the power of the human spirit.

Curiously enough, just as we were about to board our flight from Amsterdam back to the US, I checked my email. Good news.  My publisher Henery Press loved my Misty Dawn manuscript.  And...surprise, surprise, I even had an email from Shawn Simmons regarding Malice Domestic's 14th Anthology, Mystery Most Edible.  My short story, “The Gourmand,” was selected to be included. Hmmm… Maybe instead of fearing travel, I should go away more often?

How about you? Are you an obsessive/compulsive wordsmith as well? Have you ever been hesitant to leave your computer, worried that if you looked away or allowed your attention to be diverted, you might return and find the magic had disappeared? 

 HANK: Right? No matter what we do--are we afraid to stop? Reds and readers, what do you think about this? (And readers, um, do you even notice when your favorite authors are on vacation?

Nancy Cole Silverman spent nearly twenty-five in Los Angeles Talk Radio, beginning her career on the talent side as one for the first female voices on the air, to the business side, where she retired as one of two female general managers in the nation’s second largest radio market. 

After a successful career in the radio industry, Silverman turned to writing fiction. Her crime-focused novels and short stories have attracted readers throughout America. Her Carol Childs Mysteries series (Henery Press) features a single-mom whose "day job" as a reporter at a busy Los Angeles radio station often leads to long nights as a crime-solver. Silverman lives in Los Angeles with her husband and a thoroughly pampered standard poodle.

To Hawaii and Back Again

This is truth the poet sings: That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

        Alfred, Lord Tenneson; Locksley Hall

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: As I sit here in Maine, writing this, we are expecting a bomb cyclone to turn a regular Nor'easter into a day-long blizzard, with up to fourteen inches expected in my town. After the snow passes, the Polar Vortex descends on us with a vengeance: Saturday's high will be 3F/-16C and the nighttime low is predicted at -20F/-29C. So it is bittersweet that I am here to tell you about my awesome Hawaiian vacation.

 Here are the girls and I about to take off on our flight from Boston. We were somewhat less chipper when we took off from O'Hare at 11pm (midnight, according to our body clocks) and positively staggering when we reached LA at 1:30am PDT (omgwhattimeisit EDT.)

Fortunately, we were traveling with the Sailor, and were able to bunk down at the Bob Hope USO, along with roughly 50% of the US armed forces and their families. Seriously, I slept on yoga mat beneath the piano in the reception area. We bounced back on the long flight to Kailua-Kona, and by the time we arrived we were fully able to appreciate the gorgeous heat and humidity - and the amazing drive to Hilo on the Saddle Road, which rises to over a mile above sea level and traverses the high lava desert between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea.


We stayed on the Puna coast, which- as we were to discover - is the neo-hippie center on the Big Island. You have to go to Burning Man to see more white guy dreadlocks, Indian-print sarongs and nose rings. These free-living souls were a bit underwashed, but kind and accepting. In fact, at one beach a colorful fellow named Benjamin offered me a kiss and a joint. I declined both.

We were staying at a perfect house we had gotten from AirBnB (anyone heading to Hawaii? Email me and I'll hook you up.) It was inside a forest preserve, which in practice meant that every time we drove down the (dirt) road to the place, we felt like we were extras in Jurassic Park. It had a comfortable cabin style second floor and a ground floor that was really the ground - covered in pea gravel and open to the balmy air. I made breakfast and packed lunches every day while the neighbors' chickens wandered through. 



 We took our time and relaxed. We slept late (for different values of late. I would arise at 9:30am, the Youngest would join me around 11, and the Smithie and the Sailor, aka The Creatures of the Night, sometimes didn't make it out of bed until 1pm.) 

I discovered the many delights of traveling with twenty-somethings with real jobs: they each took turns paying for dinner (we intended to eat home-cooking as we did for breakfast and lunch, but somehow every evening we wound up at a restaurant or ordering take-out. They both drove and were both capable of loading the Jeep Wrangler with the necessities for a day out with minimal instruction. (those of you who are parents are impressed, right?)

Youngest was our DJ, as she's the only family member with a Spotify subscription. I honestly think one of the highlights of the trip for her was the chance to wear Lily Pulitzer clothing every single day. 

So what did we do besides sleeping and watching the chickens?



We spent Christmas Eve Day at Volcanoes National Park, where we were able to stand near natural steam vents, see the caldera of Kilauea, the most active volcano in the world, and travel down the Chain of Craters to see the collapsed cones of past volcanoes. They looked ancient, but the entire island is one of the youngest places on the planet, only a million years old.































We went to see The Last Jedi together! I know, go to Hawaii to sit in a cinema? But we all love Star Wars and have been waiting for TLJ, and we wanted to experience it as a family. There were VERY long lines at the only movie theater in Hilo. We missed one night, and came back much earlier the next. Also the girls and I all have massive crushes on Adam Driver. (Mark Hamill is more my age range, but apparently he's been happily married to the same woman for 40 years, so there you go.) 

We had some fabulous meals, including Pacific fish fresh enough to satisfy the most stringent Mainer's taste, grass-fed beef from the Parker Ranch that was so good I may never eat grain-fed beef again. Seriously, we have a lot of grass here in the continental US! Let's use it for better burgers! On Christmas Eve, instead of our traditional Chinese take out, we had...drumroll...Thai take out. And of course we enjoyed many tropical rum drinks. If you can't put the lime in the coconut and drink it all down in Hawaii, where can you?

On Christmas day, the kids were amazed to see Santa had flown their stockings all the way from the mainland and left them stuffed with books and dvds (and pocket-sized hand sanitizers, little tubes of Eucerin, and lip balm. St. Nick believes in prepping for winter weather.)




We spent Christmas Day at a nude-friendly beach. Bet you never thought you'd see me writing that, didja? The girls and I didn't actually know about the clothing-optional aspect until we were there, at which point the Sailor swore he had already informed us. We kept our suits on - mine is a particularly old-New England-lady number with a skirt - and Youngest took her glasses off, so everyone in the distance became a bit blurred. We read our new Christmas books, picnicked on tuna salad sandwiches and leftover Thai food, and swam in the warm Pacific waters. 

You bet we wore sunscreen. The sun can kill you, you know.

We saw the Waipio Valley and the high country beyond it and drove the ridiculously scenic Old Māmalahoa Highway, which climbs and turns past waterfalls, deep chasms and heart-stopping gulches. We visited with old friends who have retired to the island. We shopped for tourist kitsch and lingered through a museum on the geology and history of the island.

My favorite part was on our last day. Our flight wasn't until almost 9pm, so we packed up and picked up in the morning and spent the whole afternoon at the thermal pond in Ahalanui Park. Cool water surged in from the ocean through a winding channel to meet up with hot volcanic spring water. It was the perfect temperature, shallow enough so almost everyone could walk comfortably on the bottom (covered in sand and smooth lava) and the county of Hawaii had improved nature by providing a safe walkway all the way around and rock steps with handrails to get in. 

Here at home, the drains in the downstairs bathroom AND the kitchen have cracked from ice. I'm trickling water into a ten-gallon tub set in the sink, in the hopes we won't lose H2O completely downstairs. When it fills up, I have to empty it off the side of the porch, because the downstairs toilet is frozen. Literally.

Is it any wonder, dear readers, that in my head I'm still floating in the thermal pool, with the sun filtering through palm leaves and a breeze keeping things from getting too hot? I'll rub a little coconut-scented hand lotion on between tossing water into a blizzard, and remember warmer times.

On vacations

No man needs a vacation so much as the person who has just had one. ~Elbert Hubbard

JAN: It's true, I just came home from a fabulous vacation in France, biking through vineyards, meeting up with old friends, and going to a great lecture on why the French are so obsessed with Sarkozy. But there's really nothing all that funny or interesting about someone else's fabulous vacation. Much more interesting is someone's really bad vacation.

The worst was a trip to Nova Scotia I took almost thirty years ago with my now husband, then boyfriend, Bill. We took a boat from Portland that had a casino on it, except we weren't allowed to go into the casino because I wasn't 21 years old yet. Unable to afford a berth, we tried to sleep outside on the deck, only the casino was really loud and went all night. But that wasn't the worst part. Or even that Bill got pickpocketed a few days later on the bus to Digby. The worst part was the bed and breakfast we stayed in while we waited for his father to wire us money.

It was a Victorian house, run by two old women, neither of which was very welcoming.(Maybe because I wasn't wearing a wedding band?) The disapproval we felt, combined with the creakiness of the old house and perhaps the trauma of having been pickpocketed, worked some pretty bad magic. I woke up at four o'clock in the morning by voices I was sure were in our room. I didn't actually see ghosts, but I was convinced I could feel them. I swear, it was the only time in my life I ever alleged a supernatural experience, and perhaps the only time in our entire relationship, Bill didn't make fun of me. He didn't even ask me if I was delirous. He got up and started packing. We wandered around the town until our Western Union wire came through and we returned to the bed and breakfast only to pay our bill. We'd been planning to go to Halifax, but instead, cut our vacation short and went straight home.

I still get the creeps thinking about it. So I want to know, what was your absolute worst vacation?

RO: I took that same ferry one year and it was the only time I ever got seasick - not fun. But the rest of the trip was wonderful so that doesn't count. I've had trips where things went wrong, but they've turned into some of my best memories so this is harder than it sounds. My husband and I went on a Habitat trip to Yunnan Province in China. We treated ourselves to a few days in Hong Kong before the rest of the team arrived, and because a good friend of ours is a travel writer we had a fabulous suite overlooking the harbor - the bathroom had a telescope in it, you get the picture. I kept referring to it as the Michael Douglas suite for some reason.

Then we left for a small village in Yunnan and a two story guest house with one pit toilet, and our own solar showers (plastic bags you fill with water and hope that the sun warms.) The first three days were fine, then there was a freak snowstorm and we had no power and no way out. We ate noodles for 4 days. People were so cold they duct-taped their (cracked) windows shut. I didn't take my Knicks stocking cap off the entire time - of course only one guy showered (showoff.)Camera batteries and Ipods died, and there was nothing to do except stroll up and down the strip that was the town. But it wasn't all bad, the street was lined with snowmen (apparently it wasn't such a freak occurence, just for the time of year that we were there.) And we dramatically altered the town's economy by buying pencils, erasers, matches, playing cards and pin cushions, the few items stocked in the village.

ROBERTA: I was newly married with two new stepchildren when my husband suggested we join his parents and other relatives on a fishing trip to Quebec. Somehow my father got roped in too. Jan, the only French involved was when we stopped for groceries and couldn't figure out what to do with the plastic bag of milk.

"Mais le lait, c'est dans un sac!" my husband exclaimed. But the milk, it's in a bag...The store owners must have thought it took very little to entertain us!

All told we drove 18 hours with a minivan full of squabbling children, then got in a motorboat to be taken out to our island and dropped off. There was nothing there except a couple of cabins and some boats for fishing. But the fishing was good only at dusk and dawn. The rest of the days stretched endlessly...endlessly. My stepdaughter famously told my husband how she hated me because she was in charge before I came along. My father woke up one morning and famously asked:

"What day is it?"'

"Wednesday," I replied glumly.

"I was afraid of that," he said.

All said and done, we've probably told those stories more often than any others. And my stepdaughter is a lovely young lady who no longer hates me (nor I her) and I adore my in-laws, so all's well!

HALLIE: I thought I didn’t have any awful vacations, but Roberta’s island getaway reminded me of the trip my husband and I and our then 1-year-old daughter Naomi and 6-year-old Molly took to Cuttyhunk Island.

Cuttyhunk is a tiny island between New Bedford and Martha’s Vineyard that you can get to only by ferry (as in small boat, not car ferry). There was one little market where everything costs a fortune since it has to be boated out there. Which meant you had to bring EVERYTHING with you. For a week-long stay with two kids, that was a lot of stuff. When we packed up our yellow Ford Pinto wagon for the trip, we were astonished that everything fit. Between the boxes of Pampers, food for the week, beach toys, toilet paper, stroller, backpack baby carrier, and so on, we looked like a family of émigrés.

The crossing was rough. When Naomi wasn’t eating or throwing up, she cried. At Cuttyhunk, we got off the boat and paid a guy with a wheelbarrow to schlep our boxes and paraphernalia up the hill to the house. Finally we arrived, exhausted triumphant. Counted kids. All present. Counted boxes and equipment. All present. Counted suitcases. Zero.

All week we argued over whose fault it was. Had we left the suitcases in the car in the garage? On the ground outside the car in the garage? In the driveway? It never occurred to either of us that we’d (note my use of the term “we”) left the suitcase open on our bed at home. No wonder the car had packed so easily.

Turned out the only thing we really needed that we didn’t have were toothbrushes, and those we bought at the store. That week, we wore sheets and dish towels while the clothes we’d worn over were being washed or dried on the clothesline. The baby fared the best. After all, we’d brought diapers. But Molly still remembers how humiliated she felt swimming in the ocean in her underwear—fortunately they were Wonder Woman Under-OOs.

HANK: Wonder Woman underoos! I did a story about them once. (They used to be flammable. Stories like that,that's why I went to journalism school. Oh wait, I didn't go to journalism school. Anyway, I bought the biggest size possible, and kept them. I loved the camisole with the big star on it.)

Vacations.You know when you're dating someone you want to impress with how flexible and cool you are, you'll do stuff that you would never consider in real life? Well, one long-gone boyfriend (Jim D., you out there?) Convinced me to go CAMPING on the APPALACHIAN TRAIL.

Actually OUTSIDE where there would be NO ELECTRICITY. Sure, I said. La dee dah.

So the night before the camping started, we stayed in a motel called something like the Fishermans Lodge in someplace in North Carolina. Me, Jim, and Bear, Jim's yellow lab. (Jim was very very cute, and a writer. Is, I mean.) In the middle of the night we heard sirens. We leaped up, and went outside. There was the hugest forest fire in the mountains. Huge huge huge. People were gathered around, watching firefighters and etc. up in the hills. Just about where we were going camping the next morning.

"Wow," I said to one man. "What happened?"

He paused. "We guess, Baby did it.

"Baby did it?" I didn't like the sound of it.

"Yup," the man said. (Remember he's very very southern.) "He sets fires (like 'fars') everytime he gets out."

"He's still 'out'?" I asked.

"Yup."

The next morning, we headed for the um, hills. But, in the good news bad news dept, the fire danger got more and more remote, since it, TORRENTIALLY, RAINED THE ENTIRE TIME.

JAN: I forgot to mention that we'd be camping BEFORE the haunted bed and breakfast, and that by contrast -- and constrast only -- the camping seemed ideal! But while great vacations might be terrific rest and all that, let's face it, horrible ones make for much better storytelling!

Come on share yours!