I’ve always told people I’m a homebody, but if you’ve kept up with my blogs this summer, you know I’m turning myself into a liar. Every month since April, I’ve been away from home on a trip or two. While it’s nice to travel, I sure miss home while I’m gone.
On this last trip, we left on July 30th for Lincoln City, Oregon where I had a table booked with the Beaches and Books group and their two-day book sale. The venue was on the beach, one of my favorite places to be, but the event was…disappointing. Only a few people showed up which made me wish I’d brought along my manuscript to edit while I sat there. Instead, I read The Secret Garden on my phone. I sold several books and got to watch the sunset at night, and that made up for it some. The next day, I left early, something I never do. Once I commit to an event, I stay for all of it, but it was too dead to stay, so I joined my grandsons on the beach instead.
The afternoon on the beach was wonderful! It was warm, sunny, and the sand was great. Visiting with my son is such a rarity that I treasure every moment I can. Hubby joined us later, and we talked as we watched the grandsons having a blast building a wall to hold back the waves so they didn’t reach us. When the eldest started burying himself in the sand, I couldn’t resist and went to join in the fun. By the time we were finished, I was gleefully covered in sand and didn’t want to leave even though it was past suppertime. We finished off the day at McDonald’s. They went home which made me shed a grandmother’s tear. I don’t know when I’ll get to see them again, and they’re growing so fast.
Hubby and I drove went through the aquarium in Newport before heading through the Cascade Mountains to the booming city of Bend. We had supper with Hubby’s friends from high school and spent the night in town. There was so much construction around there, both housing and roads, that it was hard to drive. We got away early the next morning to miss rush hour and drive across empty eastern Oregon to Boise. We spent a day there visiting with friends. It felt good to relax a little in a familiar place. I visited my former hairdresser who is in her mid-to-late 80s who has always been a special person to me. She’s shared so much wisdom with me over the years and made me look pretty. Then we went to Costco and spent a small fortune.
The next two days were spent driving across Idaho and through Yellowstone National Park. We took the time to see Old Faithful erupt and walk through the gift shop. It was afternoon and very crowded. On the way out of the park, we and many others watched a grizzly mama bear eating around rocks and logs with her two cubs. They were about a couple hundred yards away. We stayed in the truck. They were in an area that had been burned in 1988 so there were few trees to block our view. She was the only wildlife we saw that day.
That Saturday, I had a table at the Cody Romance Roundup which is in the courtyard behind a historic hotel in Cody, Wyoming. I’d been there last year and thoroughly enjoyed it and was excited to go back. I knew several of the other writers and met some new ones. The tables were scattered underneath trees and beside rose bushes. Last year it was sunny and warm without a breath of wind. This year was overcast, a little breezy, and cool. Not as many people visited the book sale as last year, but I sold several again which is a success to me. Rain started a half hour before quitting time, and since books and rain don’t mix, we all quickly packed up and left. That night, fourteen of us ate together at the historic Irma Hotel that Buffalo Bill used to own. Hubby and I didn’t go outside for the gunfight reenactment. They used to do that in Hill City, not far from where we live in SD, until one of the actors forgot to check his gun and shot a bystander by accident. That was the end of their shows and the end of us being anywhere around them.
We are home now and I’m busy working on getting my new book loaded onto the platforms who distribute it for me. I don’t want to go anywhere else for a while and am content to be a homebody again. At least until the next time someone says you wanna go sell some books? or asks me to go abroad. Until then, I’m writing and editing.