24-hours unplugged -- for the most part

A few years ago, on a book tour, I traveled to 19 cities in 21 days with nothing more than carry-on luggage. (Key to this pre-9/11 trip was a set of colorful silk blouses, black almost everything else, and praying that certain hotel dry cleaning services would actually return my clothing before I had to check out.) It wasn't uncommon to travel that way on a book tour then -- I remember one escort being unable to hide her irritation when I traveled with checked baggage the next year.

Why was she irritated? Because many times on a tour, you hit the ground running -- the plane lands at an airport that may bear a certain city's name, but is actually in an area remote from the downtown buildings where your first interviews will be held. So the escort is seeing the margin between your arrival at the airport and the next place you must be rapidly diminishing.

Since 9/11, timing for certain aspects of tours have had to be adapted to changes in air travel, but even before that, my publisher was planning tours that allowed an author a breather now and then.

Yesterday I didn't have a thing scheduled. And baby, did I take advantage of that. I had about six zillion items on my to do list, and didn't touch more than one or two of them. I just unplugged for the day. I'm thinking it was a good idea.

Now I'm going see what Tarzan is up to (although the previous adventure, when he somehow survived being guided underwater while unconscious, will be hard to beat), then go back to work on the manuscript in progress.

I do want to take a quick moment before I do that to say how much I love the photos of Jane M. Sawyer, aka "Cohdra" on Morguefile.com. She took the one above of the unplugged plug. It seems that she's often captured just what I'm looking for to illustrate this blog or my site. As you can see from photo credits on my Web site, two of the four photos currently shown near the title on this page and the site are hers. (The middle photos are Mary Thorton's photo of raindrops and Annika's of the tree and clouds.)

When you see that desert road, it may remind you, as it did me, of a scene in Kidnapped. Finding photos of deserts is not all that hard. But not all deserts are alike, as you learn if you spend any time in them. I'm glad Jane Sawyer captured this view of something I had been seeing in a combination of imagination and memory.