Posts Tagged ‘Travel’
England the tease
England is such a tease. When I arrived here, it was the hottest weather since, well, the last hot weather. Which in England isn’t exactly a treat, since the houses are designed more for trapping the air inside than for letting any faint breeze pass through. And as you might imagine, a hot spell of…
Read MoreColin Fletcher made me do it
When I was in high school in the late sixties, a book came out that changed the world of backpacking. These were the early days of REI, when that company was run out of a smallish house in s Seattle suburb, and a person could wander the rooms in a glorious fantasy of compact tents,…
Read MoreThe two-way pull
By the time I sent off the copyedit of Garment of Shadows the first week of January, my brain was empty of words. In the last year, I’ve written short stories and introductions, guest blogs, essays, & silly stuff to do with the Pirate King publication, my half of The Arvon Book of Crime Writing,…
Read MoreGo, Lisbon! (Go, Pirates!)
I’m in Lisbon today, or at any rate, I’m over at Go Lisbon! talking about my time in Lisboa. Do drop by for a visit to one of my favorite cities.
Read MoreMy thanks for a year
Well, that’s about done and dusted for 2010: anyone ready for a new year? I’ve never been much for New Year’s Resolutions—who needs to start a clean slate with a cloud of threat and incipient guilt over her head? But taking down a heavily marked-up calendar whose dozen images you know by heart and replacing…
Read MoreTall ships, taller tales
For sheer happiness, there’s nothing like being out on the water. One of my brightest memories is of a catamaran trip taken years ago in Maui where, when we turned for home, the crew put on a song popular at the time: Alanis Morrisette singing “What if God Was One of Us?” It’s a song…
Read MoreThe day before the day…
I started writing this post in London on Sunday morning, in a family kitchen, listening to the click of the heating system sending warmth towards the radiators. This is a location achieved after one local French train, one high-speed French train, one highly entertaining Paris taxi ride (French/Algerian rap music and a warning about the…
Read MoreOh Lord, stuck in Lisboa again…(or, still.)
Week seventeen of our Twenty Weeks of Buzz finds me in Lisbon, for rather longer than I had intended. You see, there’s this volcano in Iceland that decided to erupt and cover northern Europe with the kind of ash that makes airplanes cough and fall out of the sky like flies hit with bug spray,…
Read MoreForeign airs
So the way it started was, last year I had a conference in Hawaii and my family badly needed a break, too, so I flew them out for ten days following my conference, even though I had a book I needed to work on. I told them—I told myself—that I would be working on the…
Read MoreLost in the medina
I am currently in Morocco, eating the world’s most gorgeous cooking and wandering the narrow streets of Fes. I’ll post a photo or ten when I return to Lisbon later in the week, but in the meantime, don’t forget that this week’s contest is “My Fantasy Library,” with the description and details here. Send your…
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