Writing retreat wrap-up

We got back yesterday, having just adjusted to Las Vegas time, which is 2 hours behind Central time. Going to sleep last night was not easy, and neither was getting up for the train run this morning. Either something is pollenating here, or I caught a cold on the way home. Either way, I'm not feeling 100% today.

The trip went well. Eric got a lot of good info and spent the week on overload. I shopped, ate, and wrote, and I spent one day at the Grand Canyon. Since I wrote primarily on my iPad, I didn't keep track of word count while I was there, and I didn't do as much as I thought I would. I put in 11 hours and a little over 5,000 words on 3 projects. Not terrible, considering I was on vacation. Still, I thought I would do more than 2 hours a day. Going to have to work on that. Now that I think about it, the best writing day was when I was using Eric's laptop and could track word count. I pushed to get 2,000 words that day because I knew I'd be gone the next day. I used lunch and a fro yo break (there were 2 shops in our hotel) as incentive to get work done. Need to investigate that more thoroughly this week. Either I need to schlep the laptop and make it more user friendly for my needs, or I need to maybe do a page count goal on the iPad.

On the plus side, I walked over 26 miles while I was gone. It was .33 miles one way to go from our room to the buffet, so steps racked up quickly. Ironically, my low step day was the day I went to the Grand Canyon. Five hours on a bus will do that.

I'll leave you with a funny anecdote from my Grand Canyon tour. The guide, Jean Claude, was French (born in France, raised in Montreal) and rather opinionated. Just off the main highway, on the way to the west rim, there is a small town called Dolan Springs. Because the earth in the AZ desert has been hard baked by the sun--it's like 6" of concrete--it's about $30,000 to drill a well, so people have big tanks they fill every week for their homes. They apparently attach a hose from the tank to the house, and that's how they have running water. Jean Claude found this idea appalling, even commenting that there are 400 people and 6 churches. Why 6 churches? Because people need a place to pray to get the hell out. He said if he lived there, he would need "every night, 12 beers, 6 ounces of marijuana, and a teaspoon of cocaine. That's what I would need to live there. Can you imagine?"

That's character fodder, right there.