We’re still celebrating the release of Sherry Harris’s A Time to Swill and Cate Conte’s Claws for Alarm. Both books are about wonderful places to spend time. A seaside bar in a beach community and a cat cafe on an island. I want to go there. To both. Seriously.
Since most of us spent the last while indoors and only hanging out with our fellow residents, I’m not going to ask about your current hangout. Instead, I’m inviting you to invent a fantasy place where you can meet other interesting adults. Is it a bookstore, a coffee shop, a bar, a museum restaurant? Wherever you’re mentally hanging, I want to come by. Or, as we all learn to socialize again, maybe your fantasy place is a hideaway, where you can escape when re-entry is too much. Tell us about either or both!
Julie: Congratulations Sherry and Cate! And Liz! This was a great question, Barb. My initial response was a house by a lake, But upon reflection, and since this is a fantasy, my dream hideaway is a suite on a river cruise boat that travels the world. Weeks on the Nile. Months in Europe. Adventures in Asia. Since it’s a suite, people can visit.
Jessie: Add my congratulations to the chorus, Sherry and Edith! I love Julie’s idea of a river cruise! I think my fantasy would be an enormous house facing the sea where I could invite anyone I chose to stay for a visit. There would be a wrap-around porch, vast expanses of glass and at least two dozen bedrooms, a solarium, a dining room to seat fifty, a library, a walled garden, an outdoor fireplace rising from a stone patio and an art studio. It would include a turret room with a widow’s walk where I could spend a bit of time on my own looking over the churning waves to the horizon.
Liz: Thank you! Jessie, I’m totally stealing yours – a seaside house has always been my dream and the one you created sounds lovely! I would probably fill mine with foster animals (oh, who am I kidding, they would become permanent residents) but the idea is the same.
Barb: I think prior to the last year and a half I would have gone with a hideaway, one of those wonderful book nooks you see on Instagram. But, for now at least, even this introverted homebody has HAD it. I’m thinking about a diner full of regulars, where everybody knows your name and your order before you’re halfway through the door. Maybe like Gus’s from the Maine Clambake Mysteries.
Edith/Maddie: I think I’m with you, Barb, on wanting to be (safely) around people again. I’m inventing Books and Brews – a book-centered pub where all my author pals and avid fans hang out for a drink, some chat, maybe reading curled up in an armchair with an Irish coffee, but lots of company and comfortable seating. Plus walls lined with filled bookshelves and a sign reading, “Take One, Leave One.” Since we’re fantasizing, it will also be at the beach! And many congrats to Sherry and Liz/Cate.
Sherry: Thanks, ladies! I want to go to all of those places! Barb and I had lunch with a VERY famous author one time at a conference who told us about the annual four month cruise. It was a huge cruise ship but only had 150 passengers. They traveled the world going to different ports every year. That sounded pretty good to me.
Readers: Tell us about your fantasy hangout or hideaway.