I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane . . . for Amman, Jordan!

This post feels surreal. I'm really going. Really, truly. Tomorrow morning, I leave for my dream trip to Jordan and Israel for two weeks.

I've been reading about the Middle East and bedouins and camels and tribes and desert living and tents and dates and oases for more than 15 years. It's a dream come true. And it's RESEARCH for my YA trilogy!!!

I want to drink camel's milk and sleep in a goat hair tent (we do get to visit a Jordanian Bedouin family and sit around their campfire!) and feel the desert air on my face and smell the wildflowers and feel the sand beneath my bare toes.

My husband is coming and we also invited my mother and my oldest son (the other two sons are in the middle of their semesters and too close to graduation! Sorry, boys - next time!)

Our trip was scheduled this past November, but my brother was too critically ill. It's been a flurry of preparation the last three weeks as well as prepping a new manuscript to sub to my editor and book festivals and flu and all that *stuff*.

In twenty-four hours I board a plane to Atlanta. Then Paris. Then Amman, Jordan. Wow.

Find me on Facebook for pictures and updates when I can log into the internet. https://www.facebook.com/kimberleygriffithslittle 

Au Revoir, dear friends!  Keep the home fires burning . . .

With love,
Kimberley

Home From Louisiana!

We just got home late last night and it was FANTASTIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hubby and I had such a great time we didn't want to come back. (It's been years since we've had a trip for just the two of us and our home life has been pretty crazy chaos the past two years.)

We went dancing with Miss Olive and Mister Elward Stephens on Front Street in Morgan City - a couple in their 80s that I met last April who are absolutely awesome, practically live off the bayou and swamp right out their back door, and act about 30 years younger. Aren't they cute?



We ate barbecue at Gros Marina eight miles down Four Mile Bayou (a local joke), went to an outdoor Cajun boucharie (pig roast complete with cracklin's being cooked over an open fire in a black cauldron) and hubby was offered moonshine to drink!!! We also ate tons of shrimp, crabs, gumbo, and jambalaya.

We rowed a canoe for 3 hours in the bayous where A FISH LITERALLY JUMPED INTO OUR BOAT!!!! A mullet flopped and danced in the bottom of our boat until we could scoop him out. It was wild. And we saw tons of turtles and birds and gators. We were the only ones out there and it was so peaceful I didn't want it to end. Mullets jumped all over the place. We could see them everywhere as the afternoon deepened. They jump about three feet in the air. Amazing. The weather was perfect all week, too. Sunshine every day and 75 degrees.

We met SO MANY PEOPLE and talked about traiteurs and their personal experiences with traiteurs and my upcoming books, and I have a whole new *fan* base, ha ha!

Hope y'all are well - not sure I'm going to have a chance to read back through 10 days of journals. Not when I gotta finish my first draft by Thanksgiving . . . but I'm waving and sending love!

Friday Five

1. I'm spending hours online researching for my editorial revisions of THE HEALING SPELL, but not blogging - or getting the treat of reading y'all's blogs and catching up! Darn.

2. Still doing trip recovery, catching up around the house, and downloading 950 photos - yes, you read that right! I took nearly 1,000 pictures with my new nifty Panasonic Lumix camera that my husband bought me as a treat for my trip. I LOVE this camera!

3. I'm also reading the 150 pages of copied research from books and newspapers and Master Theses from the Louisiana State University Special Collections. Did you know that they stay open until midnight? Very good news for us after a day of interviews and museums, but YEP, they had to kick us out at midnight!

4. Here's a photo of the azaleas in bloom. We were at the tail end of the season though, but I snapped up all I could! Gorgeous.



5. I'll be at our annual New Mexico SCBWI Handsprings conference this weekend! Can't wait!

I have landed . . .

I'm back! I'm home! I'm safe!

But it feels so strange to be home again - like I just returned from Mars or something instead of Louisiana, just a hop, skip and a jump from New Mexico. After you get through 980 miles of Texas that is!

16 days of 5 hours sleep a night, non-stop gabbing with one of my best friends, traveling 3,000 miles, and meeting AMAAAAAAAZING people and staying in AMAAAAAAZING places.

LOVED IT!!!

Pictures and stories coming over the next few weeks . . . but first I am in desperate need of about thirty hours of sleep. And groceries. And clean clothes.

And I gotta call my mom.