Pategonia

Partially by accident, partially by design, I am surrounded by author friends. My good friend Rachel's third book has been spotted in the wild - if you haven't already, you can pick up The Spirit Thief and the next two books in the series at major bookstores now.

My neighbor across the street is a very nice, sweet old lady, who wrote and published her memoirs of her incredible life in With A Song In My Heart.

So it was no surprise to me that, during the course of a brief in-our-respective-garages-coming-home-from-shopping conversation, she mentioned that she would be going on vacation someplace warmer this next week. She and her late husband were frequent travelers throughout South America during their younger years.

"Where?" I asked.

"Patagonia," she said.

I blanked out. I am still rather embarrassed that I had forgotten quite where in the world Patagonia is and later had to look it up on Wikipedia. I'm still more embarrassed that, for a brief moment, I thought it was a country and not a region.

Well, she's right. You probably can't get much warmer than the tip of South America in the cold of the Northern Hemisphere's winter!