And while Amanda is here at Terry's Place, I'm over at "Beyond Her Book", Barbara Vey's Blog at Publisher's Weekly, with an overall view of the Pikes Peak Writers Conference.
The best part of travel is it reduces you to thinking about the basics: food, shelter, and transportation. When you’re standing in the middle of a foreign city alone with a bad map printed off the Internet and zero knowledge of the native language, your everyday worries from back home just seem to melt away.
When I was twenty-five, I got this ridiculous notion in my head that I should travel to Budapest, Hungary alone. I was already in Eastern Europe visiting a friend, and my friend had to work the day of my Hungarian adventure. I didn’t want to waste one minute in Europe by sitting around her apartment when a whole continent was right outside the window.I took the train from Bratislava to Budapest without incident. I felt confident I knew where I was going. I had a map and a travel guide—what could possibly go wrong? I figured I’d find the Danube River and would be able to follow it on foot to the Castle Hill district where the museums and other tourists would be. Sure, the travel guide told me to use the funicular to get up the hill, but I was a poor twenty-something on a strict budget, willing to hoof-it to save money.
