I spent a month in Florida housesitting a cat named Lucy and a bird named Kiki. Before the friends whose house I was staying in left, I got to spend some time with them, which was wonderful. I visited the beach several times, day-tripped to the Everglades a couple times, went swing dancing once, and went to Krav Maga classes.
I finished the first draft of a short story I began last year as a Snippet exercise, and when I came across it again a couple months back I knew I wanted to flesh it out further and finish it. I’m about to begin the editing process on that and hopefully get it in front of a beta reader to look at next steps. Hiraeth’s Keeper is pretty much ready; I procrastinated on getting the cover art done and so that’s really all I’m waiting on for the moment.
My first half day out of my housesit I went to Ocala National Forest. It was a beautiful campground with a lake nearby. I got to try out my new tent, and there were families around (and sometime after midnight some kids rode their bikes into the campground and pissed off other campers by yelling everything they had to say: “Can I come and talk to you?”, and “I love you. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU!” until someone told him to shut up.).
The second day I went hiking. When I got back to the campsite I set up my hammock and – I can tell this story now the Lyme test has come back negative – wound up with somewhere around 60 tick bites. Needless to say, I was Not happy about this, and wound up staying in a hotel that night. And then I stayed at an Airbnb. When I tell you that these things were tiny, I could barely see them with my face up close to them. I used pet flea and tick spray on myself. A wonderful start to my travels!
I stayed at the next campground I had set up in north Georgia, in the the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest area. That campsite was pretty cool too, at the bottom of a long windy gravel road with no cell service and only one other person in the campground. After setting up the tent I drove back up to the top to let someone know where I was (you know, in case of axe-murdering) and pickup firewood. By the time I returned to the campground, it was freezing and windy, so I skipped building a fire and got into the tent. I have a winter sleeping bag which I didn’t realize was a double until now, and had to keep my head under the cover. It was so windy that night, howling through the trees so that the tent collapsed a couple times. I did not sleep very much. The first time I did manage to sleep, I had a bad dream about every atom in my body vibrating (aliens obviously) and then some dudes coming down on the ridge above my tent. Even my thick-socked feet were cold as the morning hours finally began. I was waiting the whole time for it to be just light enough to be able to pack my stuff up. And around 6 in the morning, it was.
I stayed at another AirBnb and then, since camping clearly wasn’t working out for me at the moment and I didn’t want to keep spending on lodgings, I was able to get a housesit booked near Huntsville Alabama, and following that a sit just north of Atlanta. And then, with a flight set up in the following week from the Raleigh-Durham airport for Thanksgiving week, headed into North Carolina.
In NC I stayed in Winston-Salem with a couple I met back when I was working in NC. It was great to get to spend time with them again, and I got my butt whipped in Uno. I visited Pilot Mountain while I was there. I’d driven past it several times on my way to Hanging Rock when I lived in NC so it was about time. I stayed the night with my friends’ daughter in Chapel Hill, left my car at her apartment, and Ubered to the airport at 2:30 in the morning. It was a little early, especially considering security was closed for an hour after I got there…but all was well.
Once I figure out how to get pictures uploaded, I’ll start doing that. But in the meantime, that’s all for now!