High Days and Holidays...

It’s April and I’ve been Missing in Action for two months!

I spent all of February and a good bit of March settling into our lovely new house by the river - but that’s not all I did - as Mr JH and I grabbed a last minute ‘late deal’ to celebrate my March birthday by cruising the Caribbean.

We flew to Barbados on the new ‘Dreamliner’ plane and joined the ship ‘The Dream’ on which we sailed to ten fabulous Caribbean islands over two weeks. It was all very dreamy indeed!

A dream Caribbean cruise

Mr JH and I have always loved to travel. As soon as we met, we began planning our adventures together and spent an awful lot of time and energy saving up to fund our dream destinations. We started off with an exciting one week trip to the Scilly Isles, where we took our tent and spent every day scuba diving on eighteenth century ship wrecks. A year later we married, and then spent the next two years saving up to go to our dream destination of Barbados. In 1985 we managed it. Two years after that we went to St Lucia. While on St Lucia, we were caught up in Hurricane Gilbert but despite the winds and rain and decimation all around us, our love affair with the Caribbean was far from over.

When our three kids came along we went to Centre Parcs in the UK and Euro Disney in Paris. Then once they were a bit older, we saved up every penny we had to take them to America. We would much rather save up to take the kids to theme parks and beaches in Florida than to put in a new kitchen or buy new furniture. As you can imagine, it took us many many years to get the house fixed up!

Horton's caricatured at Universal Studios Orlando Florida! 

More than anything, Mr JH likes to scuba dive, and just like chips of the old block, two of our sons are PADI scuba diver instructors. I have tried scuba diving too, but these days I much prefer to snorkel a coral reef or to lie on the beach in the hot sun with a cocktail in one hand and a book in the other.

Holidays are important to us and we have always given them high priority. We have been very lucky and have been to some amazing places all over the world, but as we’ve got older and our three lovely sons have grown up, graduated, and made their own way - it not just holidays - but travel and adventure - that calls to us.

Scuba fun!

So this year, Mr JH and I are planning to take a ‘gap summer’. Hence the new blog title! We haven’t actually retired from our day jobs yet of course, as we are both still reasonably young and we need to work, but we are fortunate to both be self-employed. As such, we have shifted our schedules to accommodate taking time out to travel before we do get too old! This will mean we will have to keep hopping home from time to time to check on things but that’s just the way it will have to work this year.

I’m hoping to use this blog over the summer months to record our experiences while we travel, so that our lovely friends and family can see for themselves what we are getting up to and share in our adventures. For the interest of my author and reader friends, I’m also hoping to chart the progress of a book I'm hoping to write this summer. ‘Love Under Construction’ is a contemporary romance novel – itself under construction – which I hope to finish and publish later this year to Kindle and paperback.

So later this month, we are back to the Caribbean: this time to the Dominican Republic – the land of waterfalls and rainforest and palm trees and beaches. I love the Dom Rep: culturally it reminds me of how Barbados was thirty years ago.

Exploring caves and climbing waterfalls in Dominican Republic

During the month of May we will be home in Scotland again, but in June we are flying off to Seoul in South Korea via Dubai to visit #2 son, who lives and works out in South Korea as an English teacher.

At the start of July we are off on an epic and exciting three month long trip, returning to the UK on the 1^st October. So where are we going exactly…..?

I’ll give you a few clues. It’s a tropical island that is approx seven miles long and two miles wide. It is surrounded by the second largest coral reef in the world (after the Great Barrier Reef in Australia) and it’s in the Caribbean.

Another clue…? Well, getting there is not easy and takes a bit of time as it’s not possible to fly direct. We are flying from Glasgow to London and then from London to Miami. From Miami we have to fly to Honduras, Central America, and then we will take a small plane out to the island….

Intrigued…? Well you’ll just have to keep popping back here to my blog to find out exactly where in the Caribbean our mystery destination is....

Public Domain Map of the Caribbean: Wikimedia.org

Do please join me on this amazing adventure!

Janice xx

Taking time out for a pearl…

 

I’m taking time out for a couple of weeks. It’s a special ‘pearl’ wedding anniversary for Mr JH and I this month, so we are off somewhere romantic to celebrate. Although we have organised housesitting cover for the hens and the dogs while we are away, I won’t be blogging or tweeting or FB’ing  as usual (I’ve promised Mr JH that I won’t!!) but I’m sure I’ll return with renewed online networking vigour and lots to share – so until then - lovely peeps, have fun answering this question.

 

How many years have Mr & Mrs JH been married if it’s their ‘pearl’ anniversary..?

 There's a free ebook copy of Voodoo Wedding in a prize draw for all those who comment below while I'm away - or tweet the answer using @JaniceHorton so I see it - when I get back!

 

Haste ye Back in a couple of weeks...

 

 

 

A bit of sunshine and out comes the bikini..!

 

 

 

This week, while Horton HQ was encapsulated in a mist so thick there was no sky never mind any sunshine, it seemed entirely unfair to me that everyone south of the Scottish border was basking in a summer heat wave. On Facebook there were wall to wall photos of blue skies, sunny gardens, and friends having their breakfast al-fresco. Envious, me? You bet!

So I did a shout out to my lovely English friends – it was a plea actually – to send the sunshine north. And guess what? It worked!

The very next day (yesterday) miraculously, we had warm glorious and mood enhancing sunshine that had me casting off the layers of winter woollies I have lived in for months and hauling summer clothes out of my wardrobe.

In no time at all, in a sunshine infused frenzy, I was trying on strappy tops and white cotton dresses – and erm, bikinis.

All ready for my summer holiday then…?

 

 

Mmm, not quite.  I have now hauled my trusty torso-track gadget from the back of the cupboard and I’m frantically doing the necessary workout. It seems that winter woollies can hide an awful lot more than a bikini ever could. Now, do you think if I did a shout out my clever English friends to send me a stomach as flat as my ironing board, that it might work too…?

Haste Ye Back (that’s both you and the sunshine…!)



Spring Break…



 

I hope you all had a lovely Easter holiday. I had a busy weekend with family visiting. The snow is still on the ground here in Scotland, in patches and on the hills, but the sun is shining and lambs are out of the field and so it feels like Spring has sprung at last. I hope the sunshine stays for this weekend as we have two birthdays happening. I’m also really excited that a very dear friend is coming to stay for at the cottage for a few days. So I’ll be taking a Spring break until next Friday and I'll leave you with a picture of the Easter eggs I received from my ‘girls’!

 

 

 

Haste ye Back!

Janice xx

How To Brighten Up A Dull Week!

This is an impromptu Monday blog post to celebrate the launch of my blogger friend and fellow author Jean Bull’s collection of stories ‘Postcards and Suntan Cream’ which would certainly brighten up a dull wet week in Scotland!

 

Jean says: “Each day I will be blogging about one of my favourite holiday destinations which form a backdrop to my stories. All you have to do to join in is: Leave a comment on my blog.  Write about a favourite holiday destination on your blog.  Give link back to my blog. Then on Sunday, January 13th, 2013, at 6pm GMT, I will put all the Holiday Party Bloggers' names in my sun hat, and the first out will receive a signed copy of Postcards and Suntan Cream!”

So here is a photo from one of my favourite holiday destinations: Florida.

 

 

As a family, we have been lucky to have some fabulous holidays and when our boys were younger; we went over to Florida to do the theme parks and what a time we had! This picture, a caricature of my husband, our three boys and me, was drawn at Universal Studios theme park and it makes me smile every time I look at it!

 

So do pop over to Jean's Blog and join in all the blogging fun!

But before you go - do pop back here again on Friday when, after last Friday’s ‘Planning Ahead’ post and in response to comments here on the blog and on Twitter, I’ll be looking at clever and innovative ways to save time in your day so that you can have some time over to focus on achieving your personal and writing goals. Top Tips will be shared by fellow authors and a professional Productivity Ninja. Yes really! It's not to be missed!

 

Love, Janice xx

 

Where’s my ereader….?

When I saw this fabulous photo of Nigella Lawson in her home library I was green with envy. I mean, look at it! If there is a Heaven, then surely it has a room exactly like this and with no lifetime restrictions on reading everything ever written - well, perhaps not everything, perhaps not 'All Those Shades of Grey'.

You may be surprised at my greenness – thinking surely, that as a writer who exclusively writes e-books, I might instead covert the latest ereading technology instead…?

Well, the truth is… I love all books.

I love all the lovely new ones with bright colours and sparkles. I love dusty old tomes with aged dedications, I love, love, love them all. And there lies a problem, dear reader…

You see, in my home office I have shelves of books. On the top shelves I have lots of paperback novels (in most genres) and below those I have all the heavyweight hardbacks. On one particular ‘special’ section I have all my precious first editions and coveted collectable books (you mean, I hadn't  actually mention this fetish to you…?) alongside my signed and personally dedicated to me books (sighs and strokes books…)

My love of ebooks came about quite by accident… actually.

A couple of years ago, Mr JH and I were taking a faraway trip and I had refused to compromise on my luggage allowance - but contrary to warnings from Mr JH about airline rules and regulations, the good people at Glasgow Airport had the decency to smile and accept my, ehem - rather large suitcase, with no fuss whatsoever. Although, this was not the case (pardon the pun) when we changed flights, my husband was proved right and I was proved wrong and we were hit with a rather excessive excess weight charge.

I recall holding my breath, crossing my arms and refusing to offload anything. ‘I need absolutely everything in that case, I told my distressed husband, so he had no choice but to hand over several hundred US Dollars to the airline concerned.

When we reached our final destination, a beach resort where one really only needs a thong – and lots and lots and lots of books – and I opened up my suitcase to find that  even though we were both suffering from severe travel fatigue and crippling jet lag, we suddenly had lots to debate about the merits of paperbooks vs ebooks. I’m delighted to tell you, dear reader, that upon our return to Bonnie Scotland, I received a Kindle as a gift from my darling husband - and I’ve never looked back.

So where do you stand with the paper vs ebook thing – or do you have room in your heart for both…?