Getting Away

I may have to get back to writing today because dialogue from a story started pouring into my head last night. Strangely, I don't have the beginning of the story, so I may do something unusual for me and not write linearly. I may just write what I have now and then fill in the gaps. This is mostly for fun and as an exercise, and if I get something workable out of it, then that's a bonus.

Meanwhile, I've taken a step toward planning that vacation I've been talking about for ages but haven't gotten around to. I was doing research for a location online and decided to actually send off for the location's vacation planning guide. I could probably find all the same info online, but their web site is annoying, and having hard copy would allow me to peruse from my sofa and see all the options. Plus, it reminds me of when I was in fifth grade and we had a class project to write to all the states for information. I think a lot of it was an exercise in writing a business letter, and then we had to pick one of the states we got info from to write a report on. Since we were military kids in Germany, it may also have been a way to keep us in touch with our home country and get a lot of mail. It certainly helped ease my transition. So now I have mail to look forward to that isn't a bill.

I'm not going to say where I'm thinking about going until after I've been there, not that I really have stalkers, but you never know, and the point is to get away. But I did decide against a city vacation for the fall. This is going to be more of a hills, lakes, trees kind of thing. I've found a waterfront hotel where I could get a room with a balcony overlooking a lake. There are hiking trails nearby and there are boat tours on the lake, and otherwise I could sit on the balcony, drink tea and read. The real question is whether I'll have so much fun planning that I never actually take the trip. I'm very bad about that.

I guess if I'm also going to try to go to England this fall, I need to start planning that. For one thing, I need to renew my passport, and while I'm in the timeframe when I would surely have it in hand before I travel, I might not have it before I need to book tickets, so I probably should have procrastinated less. I guess the expediting fee won't kill me. I should probably start looking into things like dates and airfare, etc. The books I want to research aren't immediately in the queue, though, so maybe spring would be a better time. Fall is feeling rather crowded right now, and maybe I should write the next couple of books before I start researching the ones that come later.