My family and I went to Charleston last week for our yearly vacation. We loaded all six of us into our minivan and traveled east to our destination. I’m fortunate enough to be able to read in a car. My husband and two of my children can’t read in the car because then they get carsick. So my husband often does the driving, and if I don’t fall asleep, I get to spend mile after mile reading. At least I read my books when I’m not mediating any arguments or reading to my five-year-olds. Most of the time, I tend to read romance novels or cozy mysteries. As a romance writer, I love reading all the different genres of romance: contemporary, historical, inspirational, and even the occasional paranormal. With my lifelong love of mysteries (I was hooked on mysteries the minute I opened the covers of a Trixie Belden novel), I love mysteries series, especially Carolyn Hart’s Annie and Max. Most people grab mysteries and romances when they head on vacation. I grab my presidential and celebrity biographies and hit the road.
This time I spent some marvelous hours in the car with Harry and Bess Truman in their quest to drive cross-country, thinking they’d have some anonymity now that they no longer lived in the White House. In his book Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure, Matthew Algeo goes into great depth about why that was not the case. Everywhere they went, people mobbed them, wanting to shout “Hey, Harry” or get an autograph. Police chiefs held their breaths until the former president left their jurisdiction. In the days before former presidents were accorded Secret Service protection, they left their Secret Service detail at the White House. Many of the police chiefs where Truman visited would spare officers in order to protect him and Bess as they traveled in their 1953 Chrysler New Yorker.
My wonderful hubby also got to spend hours in the car listening to whole passages from the book as I recounted story after story to him. I’d tell him about people’s reactions when they realized that the man traveling with his wife and stopping at their family’s restaurant or hotel was no other than Harry Truman. I shared with him the passage about the rise of the modern highway system and with it, the advent of the hotel.
When my oldest son fell ill in the middle of the next to last night, my wonderful hubby and I debated whether to head home but decided to stay to give his stomach a chance to settle before a six-hour car ride. My hubby took the other three kids to Patriot’s Point while I wrote the last blog and finished reading Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure. I missed my hubby when I read of the night Harry ate dinner at 21 in New York. Who else was at 21 that night? Thomas Dewey. The manager believed neither knew the other one was there that night thanks to some careful rearranging. In my hotel room, I finished the tale of Harry and Bess’ car trip. It was their last such trip. Over the course of the adventure, they came to realize people knew who they were, and people wanted to talk to them. Harry and Bess could not be any more anonymous than Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower.
Now that I’m home, I’m reading Marie Force’s All You Need Is Love and Jenna Harte’s Old Flames Never Die, a book that combines my two reading loves-mysteries and romance. On my next family vacation, I have a biography of Spencer Tracy that I can’t wait to open.
What about you? What do you like to read on vacation? Let me know.