America: The Bloggers

This post is a bit delayed because I spent the weekend at home in Somerset, celebrating that (a) Colin had passed his driving test – first time, donchaknow, which is no mean feat in the UK, and (b) I had handed in my DPhil thesis.  There will be more on that soon, honest, I just have a lot of catch-up posts to write, not to mention a pile of ten or fifteen books to review for your infotainment.  But first things first; I told you about the books I bought, and now I want to tell you about the bloggers I saw.

Well, you probably already know – it was Thomas from My Porch and Teresa from Shelf Love.  If you click on the ‘My Porch’ link there, it’ll take you to Thomas’s report of our time together – I’ll be doing a more emotive version, and probably thus less coherent!

When I decided I was going to visit Lorna in Washington, I knew that I wanted to catch up with two of my favourite bloggers (both of whom I had previously met on English soil) but that I only really had weekdays free, as I wanted to spend my weekends with Lorna, since that was the main purpose of my trip.  Well, I ended up being lucky enough to see a lot of Thomas (who is, may I just say, one of the kindest and nicest people I’ve ever met – blush from afar, Thomas) and both of them were free to go for a Friday drive around bits of Virginia, looking for bookshops.

I’ve already told you the books I got; Thomas’s pile are in the post linked about, and Teresa tweeted hers here.  Yes, that is Miss Hargreaves in her pile, guess who put it there?  There was a tense moment when I spotted a Virago One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downs (such a good book) for only $1.40 and both bloggers wanted it – in the end they flipped a coin, and Thomas was lucky, but Teresa certainly didn’t do badly for Virago books that day.  Both of them came away with wonderfully teetering piles of books; I only bought four, but that was because I’d bought so many others already, and was worrying about baggage weight… and I think you’ll agree, book shopping is huge fun whether or not many books are bought.  There’s nothing I like more than browsing shelves of secondhand books in great company.

We took it in turns to take photos outside the various bookshops…

…and I was introduced to the joy that is Dairy Queen.  I realised later that I had been to DQ a few times in the Philippines, but this trip (and my delicious double fudge cookie dough Blizzard) made me all the more sad that the UK is sadly lacking in DQs.  Get on it, UK.

All in all, it was a delightful day and I think we all had a great time, chatting away about bookish things nineteen-to-the-dozen, and I’m sad that it’s likely to be a long time before we can have a repeat of the day.  I came to the US to see a very dear friend and her husband who had moved away from England, and ended up leaving four good friends behind.  Poor friendship/geography economics, perhaps, but a price worth paying for a wonderful time.