That Was Fact This Is Fiction

I started to write this in the comments area, but then I found myself spreading out responses all over the place so I figured I'd simply put it in a post.

I wanted to make sure no one was confusing fact with fiction. We do spend a portion of our summers at Lake Erie. However there is no Summer House...there's no town named Water's Edge. It's not something I have done for a lifetime. I think this will be the tenth year Amy and I have gone there. The houses where we've stayed have varied over the years. It's a wonderful time with family, 17 or 18 of us, all together. There are no dark times of introspection. We eat ice cream, play shuffleboard, and rush to get the daily newspaper to learn what celebrity has died (our vacations are always bad for celebrities...they start dropping like flies). Last year, Amy and I explored a little winery nearby which is about as exciting as it gets.

There is no Internet access. I think there's a phone in the rental house but we won't use it.

The only link between Summer House the story and our annual family vacation is that I love that area and I thought in the winter it would make a nice setting for story about isolation and fear. There is a lighthouse, but it's not on Johnson Island, it's at Marblehead, across the bay from the Cedar Point amusement park where my stepson works summers as a caricature artist. Johnson Island was a prisoner of war camp during the Civil War, thousands of confederate soldiers were housed there - hundreds are buried there. You can learn more about that through the Daughter's of the Confederacy.

I may write a little while I'm at Lake Erie -on my PDA with its pseudo usable keyboard, but I doubt it. Our time away is a time "unplugged".

We'll spend part of our vacation near Dayton, Ohio where I will have Internet access. I may post something brief, and will check email, but I do believe when you go on vacation you should try very hard to leave almost everything behind...that includes work, dogs, and blogs. I make an exception for kids, but then again our kids are all grown up...in past years I might have been willing to negotiate that as well.

We don't leave until Wednesday, but have lots to do before then so posting is going to be sporadic even before we leave I suspect.

This post is one of those things on the "to do" list, so now that's one more item I can scratch off, and we're one step closer to departure.

P.S. Any burglars, thieves, aimless blog worshippers reading this...our house will not be empty while we're gone and there are big vicious dogs...well, okay they're not big or vicious, but we do have dogs. Plus, there's nothing worth stealing...everything we have that is of any true value travels with us...always.