Welcome! We are once again celebrating Boomer Lit
Friday, and we’re switching gears from the fictional Never Say Perfect to a nonfiction
Boomer travel memoir entitled From Italy
with Love & Limoncello.
We hope that you will leap on
over to http://www.boomerlitfriday.blogspot.com to visit several Boomer sites which feature book excerpts.
Please don’t hesitate to comment, and we’d love it if you would "Like" the
Boomer Lit Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/BoomerLit.
From Italy with Love & Limoncello:
Description:
What
happens when four Boomer-age non-Italian speaking women embark on an unguided
tour of three regions of Italy? Add miles to the soles of your shoes as you
visit Florence, Greve, Sorrento, Capri, Positano, Pompeii and Rome with Mary
Anne, Laura, Sharon and Marianne. Whether you are returning to this intriguing
country rich with history and magnificent beauty or visiting Italy for the
first time, traveling with these women will offer unique insights and stories
of international incidents never to be duplicated by a typical tour guide!
Today’s excerpt picks up at the
airport in Rome, where I have just arrived on a direct flight from Charlotte,
N. C. Laura, Marianne and Sharon have
already landed at least two hours ahead of me because they were flying directly
from Newark. We need to connect…now. Remember, this is a true story and not another airport scene that was formulated in my imagination!
Hmmm...I'm
looking all around into a sea of strange faces and don't see the girls
anywhere. Where could they be? For just a brief moment, I feel minor panic. I'm
in a foreign country, everything around me is chaotic, and I have no idea what
all of the gibberish is that is being uttered around me. I can't just hail a
cab and go to our hotel because we are going to catch a train to Florence as
soon as we connect with each other. This is getting slightly unnerving.
It’s
similar to imagining landing in the midst of a crowd after having disembarked
from your flying saucer and finding that you are on an alien planet. Nothing
looks remotely familiar, and the people on this planet cannot communicate with
you, nor you with them.
I
take a deep breath, move over to the side of the room...away from the crush of
human traffic and luggage going by and retrieve my World Mobal phone. What were
those peculiar dialing instructions? Will I even have service on this phone in
this location? Is it reliable? Were we crazy to plan this on our own? Marianne
and Laura have traveled to Paris and Venice before, and Sharon has been to
Ireland. I've traveled extensively throughout the U. S., but the only foreign
lands I've ever been in were Canada, Mexico, Grand Cayman, Bermuda and Jamaica.
What if I can't find them or reach them by phone? Do we even know what to
expect without a tour guide to direct us?
A
visit to http://www.awriterspresence.com will present you with links to all
formats of the books from which excerpts have been featured on this particular
blog site during Boomer Lit Fridays.
Have
a great weekend, y’all!
Mary Anne
Nicely written.
ReplyDeleteYes, coming into an unknown airport...well described, that angst as you step off the plane!
ReplyDeleteLove the space alien analogy!!!
ReplyDeleteYou did a great job of describing your panic. My husband and I were traveling in Europe and got separated in an airport, so I can definitely relate to your fears. This sounds like a book I'd enjoy.
ReplyDeleteMight be a travel memoir, but pulls the reader into the scene like fast paced fiction. Well done.
ReplyDeleteMakes me want to get on the plane, but knowing I cannot, I'll take second best and read the book.
ReplyDeletej
Thanks so much for the comments from everyone! They are greatly appreciated, and this was certainly fun to write!
ReplyDeleteMary-Anne - just the title of your book makes my mouth water. Italy and limencello - a marriage made in heaven.
ReplyDeleteI can't wait to read more. Thanks so much for sharing.
I'm on the BoomerLitFriday blog for the first time today. :-) I'd love you to pop by and say hello, and hopefully enjoy my extremely short excerpt from Let Angels Fly, set in Cambodia.
thanks
Noelle Clark