Foreign Parts

Well, yet more foreign editions arrived in the mail today but  I think we've seen enough of them.  Instead, people have been asking about our trip away and where we've been  - so here's a brief travel

report   now that I've woken from the jet lag and unpacking/washing.

We flew to America-  to Montana to be exact. There we met up with and stayed with the wonderful Anne McAllister. Book discussions galore - I don;t think you've seen anyone really talk until you've seen a couple of writers get together and discuss books.

Anne and I of course talked romance and looked into the prospect of possibly working together - or working with another publisher  perhaps in the future. The Babe Magnet meanwhile did lots of research into the wild west and its history. (Did I ever mention that he has a second identity as a writer of Westerns - and he's embarking on a bigger, deeper story right now. )  So he thrilled to explore the town of Cody Wyoming.  The town is  named for its legendary founder, Buffalo Bill Cody, that  remains as full of Old West adventure as it was during the days when Bill himself roamed Wyoming.

The Fountain Paint Pot is a mud pot located in
 Lower Geyser basin in Yellowstone National Park.

We drove from Montana to Cody, going through Yellowstone Park on the way and it was a real thrill to come face to face (almost literally) with the huge buffaloes that roam through there.  Encountering one right in the middle of the road  mean we decided the wisest course was to stop and wait for him to move on – which he did, eventually.  A huge animal.

In Cody we stayed in the historic Irma Hotel which was built by Buffalo Bill himself and named for his younger daughter Irma. The rooms are decorated in ‘historic’ style so you can imagine what it would have been like to stay there in the past. And there’s even a dramatized. ‘gun fight ‘ out in the street one evening.

  The Buffalo Bill Centre provides huge amounts of research information and displays so DH spent an age in there. I loved the Plains Indians displays

there - so many beautiful things. And as anyone who knows me knows that I’m partial to a pair of fancy shoes, there were several pairs of embroidered and beaded moccasins  I would have liked to bring home with me.

Montana is one of those places where the weather can change several times from sunrise to sunset. Driving through Yellowstone, in  68+degrees,  it was a shock to see snow still piled up by the roadside – in June. We ever stopped to have a game of snowballs at one point!

And there was a special delight in waking every morning to see the mountains away in the distance – that is, when the rain and the snow (yes there was a brief snowstorm!) had cleared away. So many memories - and I'm sure that so much of what we saw will end up in one book or another at some point.