Author Road Trip

Romance authors know how to do a road trip better than anybody. Two of my critique partners and I recently proved that. Last Thursday we all desperately needed to get out of town. So we set a destination for historic Waxahachie, intent on doing a bit of antiquing and sharing lunch, perhaps at a tea room.

My partners in crime were Victoria Chancellor (fellow American author who also blogs here) and Silhouette author Rebecca Russell. And here are the reasons we are day trippers extraordinaire:

1. The schedule. We plan to leave at ten, but if we meet up at ten-thirty and spend twenty minutes trying to find some place to leave my car where it won't get stripped down to the chassis, that's okay. No one in this group worried about the time. The only thing we cared about was that we were getting the heck outta Dodge.

2. The car. We didn't just have an SUV, we had an Escalade. (I don't want to think about what the gas cost!) The Escalade had On-Star, which is GREAT for when you get lost. Which brings me to:

3. The route. We had all been to Waxahachie before. It's only about 35 miles south of Dallas. We didn't need no stinkin' map. We all knew to exit at the billboard. However, due to construction, the billboard was gone and we overshot our exit by, oh, another thirty miles. (Yes, we were talking.) In fact, we ended up in Hillsboro, another historic town with a cool courthouse. Did we care? Heck no.

4. The food. We found ourselves a funky diner on the town square (not exactly a tea room). We did not count carbs or fat grams. We used real sugar in our tea. (Strangely, they didn't offer "sweet tea," usually a staple in small southern towns.)

5. The shopping. We spent the next hour or so combing through an un-air-conditioned antique mall, ferreting out things we remembered from childhood and even bringing a few home with us.

6. The food again. Shopping burns a lot of calories, so we found ourselves a Starbucks on the highway and indulged in mochachinos.

7. The shopping again. If we'd gone straight home, we'd have hit I-35 in rush hour. No one does that on purpose. So we doubled back and hit Waxahachie after all. We took the requisite pictures in front of the courthouse (that's Victoria, left, and me. Rebecca took the picture.) We found an awesome scrapbooking store--all of us are crazy about paper. Must be a writing thing. Then more antiques.

Finally, exhausted, we headed home with our flea-market treasures and more bits of small-town trivia to add to our research arsenals. Don't be surprised if you see bits and pieces of this trip showing up in our future books!