“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
Seneca The Younger
I’ve mentioned before that my first book trip (to Lamanai) caused me to blend more realism into my stories. But I didn’t realize all the ramifications until my travel guide daughter was planning our next book trip (to Italy and Greece for research for books 5 and 7) and asked if I was okay if we stayed with some of her friends’ families. Normally I wouldn’t be comfortable with it because I’m an introvert at heart. But then I realized that my most memorable book trip moments were those that pushed me out of my comfort zone. That got me thinking about how I’m a sucker for unspoken ‘I dare you’ challenges.
I’m not the most adventurous person – but I’m probably a little above average when it comes to doing crazy stuff. For instance, when I was younger, I:
- Took long cross-country trips on my own. I took my first solo train and airplane rides before I was 14 and can still remember my nervousness at having to switch trains in Kansas City at 5 AM on my way to high school.
- Took up spelunking in high school – and I’m not talking about tourist caves where there are lights and paths. To get around, we used carbide lamps for light and crawled around on our bellies in the dark for hours.
- During college, my brother and I hitchhiked from Colorado to Seattle. It was quite an adventure! I put one of my experiences from that trip into book 3 – The Sangreal.
- In the military, I felt like I had to keep up with my peers, so I;
o Screed down mountainsides during Northern Warfare School in Alaska. ‘Skiing’ down a steep mountainside of small rocks with only a walking stick for control was super hard on my knees and thighs.
o Besides boating around on the central Alaskan rivers, the most incredible thing we did in that school was rappel into a glacial crevasse. I can still remember the feeling of descending into that glacier with nothing but millions of tons of ice surrounding me.
o And, of course, it was expected that all my classmates would go to Airborne School and jump out of airplanes.
o But, of all the cool/scary/crazy things I did in the military, going to Ranger School represented the best and worst of my experiences. And it all started on essentially a dare.
Then I got married, had kids, got involved with my career, and cast aside all the dares – until Alex Scire, my protagonist, came along. Since then:
- I let a tarantula crawl up my arm inLamanai because my youngest daughter embarrassed me by quickly volunteering to let it crawl on her.
- I ate dried grasshoppers because one of our tour guides in Belize told us about people eating termites that tasted minty, which I put into book 1 – The Palantir. However, I resisted doing that until I heard what my daughters ate at a local market in Viet Nam.
- I jumped off a train, down a hillside, in Romania. We were visiting Prejmer, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and followed the locals out the door to the right. The train pulled away a couple of seconds later, and only then did we see that if we’d gone out the left side of the train, we’d have stepped onto a platform. Woops.
- I chartered high-speed motor boats to Lamanai and Blackbeard Island (book 3 – The Sangreal).
- And, I’ve taken trips to places you’d never think of as tourist nations – especially Haiti to see the Citadelle Laferrière for book 2 – The Pair Dadeni.
But I have my limits. The picture below shows my daughter skydiving, checking one more item off her bucket list. I’ve jumped out of enough airplanes in my life, though, and don’t plan on jumping out of another one – although I learned a long time ago to never say never😊
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