Getting Away by Terry Burns

We talk about the need to find writing time, carving it out from a crowded schedule. For those of us who are immersed in it 10-12 hours a day six days a week occassionally we need to figure out how to get away for a while. We just did exactly that. We went directly from working a great conference at Estes Park Colorado (Colorado Christian Writers Conference) to drive to Seattle and catch a cruise to Alaska. That put us on the road for nearly a month.

Saundra wanted to see the country, not fly over it, she wanted a road trip. We surely did that, counting the 2000 miles of the cruise we covered nearly 6500 miles on the trip. We watched Old Faithful blow its top and were trapped in the middle of a herd of a couple thousand buffalo at Yellowstone as they surrounded us going to their bedding ground for the night. One passed so close she could reach out and touch him. She got a great picture.

The Grand Teton mountains were amazing.

We really enjoyed the cruise, with ports of call in at Skagway, Ketchican and Juno on Alaska then on to Victoria British Columbia.

We saw whales and Eagles but the cherry on top was the Butchart Gardens in Victoria. Saundra got to spend a half day in a special class with a professional photographer. On the return trip we went down the Pacific Ocean shoreline, saw miles and mile of HUGE redwood trees and spent a day in San Francisco riding cable cars, photographing the Golden Gate Bridge and eating at Fisherman's Wharf.

We had a compromise. I didn't work, but I did have my laptop and downloaded my email each day to keep from getting so many that it shut my server down. OK, maybe I did handle a couple of emergency items, but for the most part I left it to do when I got back.

It was good to relax, to decompress, and even the hassle of having to dig through all that was waiting when I went back to work was definitely worth it. We all need that sometime.