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

RIP My Beloved Kindle!

 

Before I went on holiday I spent a considerable amount of time choosing and downloading to my Kindle all the books I might want to read while away. Dozens and dozens of them! After all, one of the best things about an ereader is that it holds so many books, and after once being charged a fortune in excess baggage due to the weight of my holiday reading, I’m now a total Kindling enthusiast and won’t travel anywhere without it.

 

Actually, I have two Kindles. I have a two and a half year old 3G (the one with the keyboard) and I also have the new Kindle Fire (my prezzy from last Christmas) and, as I planned to do most of my reading on the beach, I decided taking the older one with its non-glare screen was the sensible option.

But woe is me! On day two, after reading just one book (Security by Mandy Baggot – which is, by the way, a fabulous and highly recommended read) my Kindle died and could not be resuscitated. (Even on getting home and ordering up a replacment battery, it was still as dead as dead could be).

I did ask our holiday rep if there was any books I could borrow, there was but they were all printed in Russian and German, which I neither read nor speak. So for those of you about to embark on your summer travels with your full stocked ereader, I might suggest you sneak a paperback or two into your luggage, just as a back up!

If you fancy reading my Kindle bestselling and award winning humorous novel Bagpipes & Bullshot this summer, you can win a copy between now and the end of June by answering this simple question (if you don’t know the answer you could always Google for it!)

What exactly is Bullshot…?

Answers in the comment box below, my email to me at janice@jancehortonwriter.co.uk or you can post to my Facebook Author Page (which I’d love you to Like while you are there!)

Haste ye back here next Friday!