Since I was able to co-opt such a brilliant deputy, I don't suppose anyone even noticed I was gone, but here I am, back again, slightly browner, slightly more relaxed and a whole lot poorer. Or I will be when the Visa bill comes in.
Not that the USA is a more expensive place to live than the UK. It's been a long time since I filled my own car's tank for less than £40, and the one we rented had a much bigger tank. But motels and restaurant meals come in at a little more than my own bedroom and digging in the deep freeze for something to cook. And National Park entry fees, reasonable though they are, soon rack up. But that's vacations for you. And Walmart's Vision Centre, sorry, Center, did fix husband's fallen-apart reading glasses free of charge, and I didn't think they did anything for free...
American friends, you have a wonderful country.
Except maybe Las Vegas.
I don't want to offend anyone, so I'll just say this: I've never been so glad to get out of a city in my life. And our brief return to get the flight home wasn't the easiest of rides either.
Once we were out in the wilds it was great. Despite the snow (which only lasted a couple of days), the roads that are maintained even less well than the ones at home (and that's saying something!), and the way you still let people smoke in bars and some restaurants (it's amazing how quickly you get used to smoke-free public places, and once you are used to it, you really notice places that aren't).
Hey, nothing's perfect. And the pluses outweighed the very few minuses by several thousand miles. People talk to you instead of politely looking away. Nice places to stay don't cost a second mortgage. And the scenery... well, that's just plain breathtaking. In the case of canyon country, quite literally, and I don't just mean the altitude. I stopped breathing more than once.(Dale, in response to your message a couple of weeks ago, you really have to see the Grand Canyon. Maybe a little sooner than the 87-year-old lady from Nashville who I met at the South Rim, who was determined to get there before she died.)
Other people's holiday photos soon get boring if you weren't there, so I won't rabbit on. This is a blog devoted to crime and mystery fiction after all, so I'll wrench my attention in that direction. Not that it's much of a wrench.
Needless to say, that's the direction I headed in both times I found myself in a bookshop, and that wasn't a wrench at all. In the small but perfectly formed Sundancer Bookstore in Springdale, Utah, on the edge of Zion National Park (location of the first of many wows of the fortnight), I was delighted to see Ruth Downie's Terra Incognita on the shelf. Ruth is one of the UK's historical crime brigade's best kept secrets; if you haven't discovered her inimitable Gaius Petreius Ruso yet, you have a treat in store. I've already read Terra Incognita, a few weeks ago, under its Brit title Ruso and the Demented Doctor, and I hardly stopped smiling for the three days it took. Ruso and the Root of All Evils was one of my holiday reading choices; it didn't outlast Las Vegas.
The shop also yielded up the Tony Hillerman I always buy when I'm in the US; he's available over here, but only in a few shops, so rather than resort to Amazon, I save him as an occasional goody. And I discovered a small treasure: a book of long short stories which included one by J D Robb. I seem to pick up one of these every time I visit the US, and my suitcase is the only means by which they find their way to the UK.
Alas, E J Copperman hasn't found his way to the UK or Utah yet. But in Flagstaff's Barnes & Noble a few days later I struck gold: An Uninvited Ghost nestling right next to Night of the Living Deed. Five minutes later they nestled in a paper bag, and now they've joined my teetering reading pile. Looking forward to them, Jeff.
I never did work out why B & N filed Lee Child's entire oeuvre under Literature, though. Lee's books are great, but I somehow don't think he'd line himself up alongside Saul Bellow and Edith Wharton – also great in their way, but not big on fast-paced action scenes.
So there you have it, folks. What I did on my holidays, with added crime fiction.
And now, back to the real world. Whatever that is.
