Deborah Cooke: Author

Today, my blog guest is Teresa Morgan, a friend of mine who has been having great success with the digital release of her contemporary romances. Without further ado, here’s Teresa!

I just got back from a fantastic vacation on a houseboat in Amsterdam (Yes, I know, I’m jealous of me, too). Ten days away from my work, away from my life. Away from everything I worry about most of the time. No schedule, no pressure, and even most of my daily tasks were taken care of. The hardest I worked was boiling an egg.

Traveling to a foreign country is like escaping into a different world. There are new rules to discover and obey, new ways of thinking, a new history to learn, and a new culture to experience.

Amsterdam was so different from both the hometown where I grew up(One traffic light, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, no Macdonalds.), and the city where I live now (Big, spread out, tons of cars and huge suburbs.). I feel as if visiting this place that’s so different than anything I know opened up my life to new experiences I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t gone.

I found that the tiniest cultural differences translated into big changes. The city core of Amsterdam is very small, so you don’t need a car. In fact, they’re impractical. Everyone has a bike. There are probably 1000 bikes for every car on the streets. While I was in Amsterdam, I lived in a houseboat on the Broewersgraacht (Brewer’s Canal), and walked nearly everywhere.

I don’t know about you, but I drive practically every day, yet when I got into the taxi to catch my return flight from Schipol airport, I realized I hadn’t been in a car for eleven days.

Because I live in North America, it was simply amazing to be surrounded by the kind of history you see in Europe. Two streets over was a pub that had been serving beer since the seventeenth century (Twice as old as the city I live in!). We had coffee and apple cake at a restaurant where Rembrandt painted, and where the first stock market was born. We walked by Anne Frank house once or twice a day. Inside, the photos of movie stars she cut out of magazines still cling to the walls.

In a way, I felt like I not only visited modern Amsterdam, but time-travelled through the centuries, too. I walked streets that had been conquered by Napoleon, saw the places that inspired Van Gogh, and stood in a room where a young girl dreamed of a better future.

I got the chance to step out of my daily routine and visit a place where the houses look like they lean over the canals, and where a culture of openness and toleration made it possible for people of all faiths and backgrounds to live together long before other places in the world. I felt the adventure of going someplace new and spending my time in ways I wouldn’t normally let myself (Spend an entire afternoon just walking around doing nothing? That’s crazy!).

And isn’t that exactly the experience we get from reading a great book? You get to step out of your head and into a new, unknown space. You get to feel the adventure and excitement of something beyond our own life. You experience what it’s like to be different than yourself, to make different decisions to the ones you normally would. Whether it’s the tale of a young girl whose life is being ripped away from her by hate, or the story of two people falling in love, a good book gives us the chance to vacation in someone else’s skin. We get to feel what someone else feels, to go outside our own view of things and open our minds to a different way of seeing.

A book can make you feel the suffering of other people or just whisk you away from your daily life so you can come back to it happy and refreshed.

Think of your favorite book. Is it about a life that’s just like your own? I’ve got ten euros that says it’s about someone different than you. Someone braver, someone who says yes when adventure comes knocking. And I bet they have an amazing adventure, whether it’s a quest into a fantasy world, delving into a mystery, or just facing the challenge of falling in love. By reading that book, you get to ride along on a journey you wouldn’t normally get to take (and still be home to watch America’s Got Talent. Yay Landau Eugene Murphy!).

(And here’s where I mention my own book, Cinderella and the Sheikh, which I wrote after I visited Egypt. A few of the incidents in the book actually happened—sort of. I’ll let you guess which ones.)

Books and vacations can both be amazing emotional adventures. They can open your mind and make you think about the way other people live. They can make you feel, make you think, and make you dream. Or, they can just be a lot of fun, escapes from your life.

So here’s my question for you–what’s the best vacation you’ve ever had in a book?

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Teresa Morgan: I grew up in a cold, wet country, dreaming of the desert. At an early age, I was exposed to the 1001 Arabian Nights, and that was it for me. The exotic tales of magic and romance imprinted on my brain, ensuring I would never be the same.

My hot contemporary romantic fantasies are:

Cinderella and the Sheikh: Sometimes Prince Charming isn’t what he seems… Amazon and Barnes and Noble

Handcuffed to the Sheikh: Best. Abduction. Ever. Amazon and Barnes and Noble

I’ve been to Thailand, Ecuador, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. If you like, you can check out some of my Morocco snaps in the photo section of my Amazon page.

I love to hear from readers almost as much as I love sheikh romances. Email me at teresamorganauthor@gmail.com