Lucky Day 13: Home and the Field of Dreams

Yesterday we hit traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and finally had to reduce speed down below 65. It’s amazing how little traffic the rest of the world has. Ahhh… New York City. It’s good to be home. 45 minutes going what would normally be 15 to get from the Verrazano to Northern Boulevard in Jackson Heights. We travelled half of New Jersey in the same amount of time on the Jersey Turnpike, and twice that in North Caroline on I-95. Did you know the speed limit is 70mph down there?

We’re unpacked and have slept a full night in our own beds and yes, that does feel good. I even have six full days of vacation left so although the day job worries me (looming like a nuclear missile would be the appropriate metaphor I think) I can ease back into life at a slower pace. It was interesting to see the effects of Irene on the land we passed through. I-95 is like a tunnel, trees to both sides for so long, and it’s basically straight, so we only saw downed trees in North Caroline and Virginia. But the sense of being in a sort of time machine was visceral. Overall, the trip back was quick and uneventful – hard on the butt of course, but that goes with sitting for 6-8 hours a day in a car. We didn’t stop at bookstores on the way back because we were all pretty much done in by Universal and the driving. And… we wanted to get home. That’s the sign of a good vacation. It was time to be home. That and my family might have mutinied if I asked them to detour one more time – just an hour to visit one more store… no (imagine the flurry of debris thrown at me from the back seat from my son) … we headed home.

I have a list of stores to follow-up on in Baltimore, Richmond, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, and Gainesville. I’ll see who has had a chance to read Open Wounds, and who may now order it to have it in-store. I’m going to make  list of stores that carry it and direct folks there (people are banging down the doors to get a copy, really). Well, as they say in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. In the case of bookselling, if they’ve read it, they will sell it. For those of you who’ve been following along with me on the trip to Universal and back, I’m going to take off tomorrow from blogging – I have a guest blog to do for a friend to put together which I’ll let you know about over the next few days – and I’ll be back on Friday.

I hope you enjoyed the trip.

I sure did.