Passport in My Pocket ~ by Author Elle Rush

After two years of saving and planning, we’ve bought plane tickets for a trip I’ve wanted to take for thirty years. This fall – finally – I will be heading to the lands of Avalon and Hogwarts. United Kingdom, here I come!

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel, but never to Europe. Now we

have two weeks to experience a thousand years of history. We will be touring Edinburgh Castle, checking out Hadrian’s Wall, visiting Bath for all things Jane Austen, and running around London until our shoes wear out, including a rest stop at a West End Theatre performance. We don’t know if we’ll ever return, so we are doing as much as we can in the limited time we have.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my hometown of Winnipeg. Last summer we did a stay-cation and hit a bunch of tourist spots that locals generally don’t bother with. But spending our vacation days at home was a choice we made in order to save for this trip of a lifetime.

While I grew up with Canada’s “Anne of Green Gables” and America’s “Little House on the Prairie”, I also read my fair share of classics set in England. Sherlock Holmes and I dashed off on many adventures from his flat on Baker Street, Jane Austen took me on many a stroll through Hyde Park, and Agatha Christie probably set at least one murder in one of the small country villages where our train will stop. Soon I’ll be able to see them for real. My imagination has already visited a thousand times and I fully believe it will live up to the expectations. 

Since I’m a writer, I hope to come back with a dozen story ideas and a hundred places to set them. It would be so cool to be able to set scenes in a London pub and be able to make it authentic. Or to describe the noise and confusion of Piccadilly Circus. Who knows, maybe my readers will end up with a Scottish hero, accent and all!

I’ve set books in other locations that I’ve visited. The couples in

my Resort Romance books have visited Cuba, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. If I learned to snorkel or wandered through a Mayan city, my readers can, too. Writing those books was almost as good as having another holiday. (Almost but not quite. Even a book can’t overcome a blizzard outside your window in January, no matter how good your imagination.)  I hope to do the same with my UK adventures soon.

I don’t think anyone resents travelling for fun, but it isn’t possible for everybody. If you can’t do it for real, I hope you can do the armchair version. Whether it’s non-fiction tour guides, history books, or novels, you can get away any time you like. Reading is almost as good as the real thing. Plus, inevitably you get much better pictures in a book. You won’t have random photos of your shoes appearing in your camera roll, and nobody’s heads will be cut off.   Bon voyage to you and your future adventures!

Elle Rush is a contemporary romance author from Winnipeg,Manitoba, Canada. When she’s not travelling, she’s hard at work writing books that are set all over the world. From Hollywood to the house next door, her heroes will make you sigh and her heroines will make you laugh out loud.
   She has degrees in Spanish and French, barely passed German, and has flunked poetry in every language she ever studied, including English. She also has mild addictions to tea, her garden, bad sci-fi movies, and HGTV.

Photos supplied by Elle Rush