Day Four: Highway 175, and a Bottle of Wine; and Why the Former Made the Latter Necessary

Wine Country, our temporary home

Introduction:  I recently passed a milestone birthday, one of those numbers that as a child seems so impossibly large that you never expect to get there.  It came at the end of two years of personal disaster (see this post for an explanation, if you haven't already read it), and at a time when I desperately needed something good in my life.  I tossed around a lot of ideas of how to celebrate surviving the last year (lots of hospital time was involved) and making it to my birthday.  Finally, my husband and I decided to go see the Redwoods.  We had driven through several times, but always on the way to somewhere else.  This time, we would just head south and see what we could see.  We did some searching, settled on a few (very few!) priorities, and started making plans.  Somewhere along the way, we discovered a cool resort south and east of the big trees, where every "room" was a converted caboose, and decided that would be fun and unusual, exactly what we were looking for.  

These posts are my daily reports of our trip: the things we saw, the places we went, and the people we met as we drove approximately 1,500 miles in the course of six days, and had an adventure.  I tried to write down my impressions each night before bed, or over my first cup of coffee in the morning.  I wanted the memories to be fresh, undiluted by another day or days of travel and experiences.  I can only hope you enjoy reading them a fraction as much as I enjoyed living them.  (If you haven't read the earlier parts of our adventure here are links for Day One, Day Two, Part One, Day Two, Part Two and Day Three.)

Clear blue skies were the norm during our visit!

Today started like the others, with waking up long before breakfast.  I spent the time luxuriating in the feeling that I didn’t have to get up yet, and sleeping a little longer.  The light is spectacular in the early morning here; Lake County lays claim to the cleanest air in California, according to the California State Air Resource Board, and it makes the morning light really beautiful.

This morning’s breakfast was French Toast with a Bananas Foster-style topping – sliced bananas sautéed in a cinnamon-spiced syrup.  Not nearly as sweet as it sounds, they have a gentle touch with the sugar.  Served with incredible bacon, coffee and juice.

We lingered for a while, relishing the view of the small garden outside the dining room windows and savoring one last cup of coffee.  The garden contains several bird feeders, and the activity outside the window kept us entertained.

So close you could almost touch him!

Finally, though, we made our way back to our caboose.  I tidied up a bit; the dirty clothes bag was full and we stashed it in the car.  One chore complete.  Then we walked across the street to the B&B’s pier.  Using the lock code Tony had provided, we opened the gate and wandered down to the dock.

Sitting in the reeds at the edge of the lake.

  From our vantage point over the water, we could watch a wide variety of birds and water fowl, as well as water skiers, including one very noisy yellow bird that allowed Steve to get within a few feet and take pictures before he flew away.  At first he just sat in the reeds that crowded the shore, then he flew over and sat on the gate we had just come through, all the while making amazing amounts of noise for such a small bird.  Clearly we had done something terrible!

On the gate, daring us to come any closer!

This looked like a good way to see the lake.  Maybe next time we'll have to try it!

Small, colorful birds were everywhere.

More birds, ready for their close-ups.

If we only had a boat ...

Looking back at Featherbed Railroad from the dock.  Yes, it is that close!

 We came back across the street, Steve sat in the cupola and called his brother to gloat just a little.  We hung around a little and then decided to go exploring.

Does it look like he's gloating?  Because he totally is.

The view from the cupola, looking across the street to the lake.
This could be WHY he's gloating!

OK.  Maybe I  did a little gloating, too.

The greeter in front of
the Lunchbox Museum

First up was the Lunch Box Museum in Nice.  It was only a couple miles, and we found it easily.  Steve had a great time, and was a very receptive audience for the woman that runs the place; her collection, and the rest of her merchandise, were exactly the kind of thing he loves.


 The tiny shop is packed with memorabilia, but the biggest thing is her lunch boxes.  They fill cases and shelves, and there are overhead shelves on every wall packed with some of the most obscure specimens you can imagine.

TV Westerns of the 50s.

All the shelves were full, with merchandise lovingly arranged.  Generally they were grouped by subject matter, like SF, westerns, Barbie, etc.

Space movies!

She even had a G.I. Joe that Steve drooled over, but the price tag was above our impulse threshold, even when we are on vacation.

GI Joe lunchbox.  Beautiful condition.

I can still hear Steve sighing.

Of course the thermos is extra.
Did you even have to ask??

This one's for my sister Jan, who had a real
Annie Oakley outfit when we were kids.
Does that give away how OLD we are?

Yeah, I remember Roy and Dale, too.  I'm a Boomer through and through.

Leaving the museum we continued east to the town of Upper Lake.  The “Lake” designation figures prominently in the place names around here.  Upper Lake, Lower Lake, Clearlake, Clearlake Oaks, Lakeport, as well as places like Lucerne, Middletown, Cobb, and several others that I’m forgetting at the moment.

Anyway, by the time we got to Clearlake it was already past lunchtime, and we decided something special was in order.  Fortunately for us, we found the Blue Wing Saloon and Café.  The saloon and café is part of Tallman Hotel, and both have been lovingly restored to a turn-of-the-century elegance.  The menu, though small, has a nice variety, and prices are reasonable.  Steve got a burger on a ciabatta roll, I had a chicken wrap with grilled onion and peppers (num!), we shared an apple pie with salted caramel gelato for dessert, and we still got out for well under $50, including a generous tip.  Considering out fast food stops so far, it was a small price to pay for an excellent meal in a great atmosphere.

The Blue Wing Cafe.  To the left is the Tallman Hotel.

This used to be a livery stable, I think.  Definitely a cool building!

That FOR SALE sign?  Major temptation!  The gas pumps alone almost sold me.

After a stroll around town we headed for Middletown, one of the places we had missed on our previous day’s adventure.  Did I say adventure?  As the man says, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

We went south on Highway 29, which passed Lakeport and Kelseyville, towns we’d already visited.  The highway continues east to Lower Lake where it turns south to Middletown.  We looked at the map and instead turned off onto Highway 175, which headed more-or-less directly south toward Middletown.

Within a mile or two, we began to suspect we had made a serious error in judgment.  Highway 175 was two extremely narrow lanes, and the trees growing frighteningly close to the road reminded us of Wonder Stump Road, and not in a good way.  But unlike Wonder Stump Road there was traffic on this road.

Also, serious curves.  The kind that are posted as 25 miles per hour.  Or 20.  Or 15.  Seriously, there were fifteen miles per hour curves on this road.  With oncoming traffic.




Like the large truck – some kind of dump truck, maybe – that appeared around a corner and over the center line just as we approached a tree that looked to me about a millimeter outside our lane.  Like that.

And did I mention the hills?  Up and down, up and down.  At one point there was a downhill stretch with an 11% grade.  I know, because it was posted.  Lots of places with signs that warned trucks to use “lower gear.”  We didn't get any pictures.  Probably because we were both hanging on for dear life.

We made it through the stretch of highway, though we did find a turnout and switch drivers part way.  I simply couldn’t make Steve drive the whole thing.  Looking back, we probably should have turned around as soon as we got that “Oops!” feeling, but it was all part of the adventure.  Right?

After Highway 175 we earned this!

Middletown was a cute little place, once we got there.  We ogled a few places, and then headed back.  On Highway 29.  We talked about what to do for dinner, and came to the conclusion that we had to have some local wine at least one night while we were here.  Since we have a long-standing policy that if one of us drinks the other  is designated driver (and yes, we are both lightweights enough that that includes even a single glass of wine), that meant taking a bottle home with us.

We stopped at a local grocery store and picked up some cheese to go with the crackers we already had, a bottle of local Reisling (it was too late in the day for an actual winery), some grapes and a half of a tiny watermelon.  We stopped at Foster’s Freeze in Lucerne (a California tradition since 1946, IIRC) and got ice cream for dessert.  It wouldn’t keep, so we had to eat it there.    We both remember Foster’s from our childhoods, so nostalgia dictated at least one visit before we left.

The ospreys nested in the top of these trees.

Back home, we pulled the folding camp chairs out of the van (“It’s a van, we have room” was our packing
motto) and set them up on the grass outside our caboose.  We each had a book and a Kindle, and we settled down to enjoy our evening.  We watched as the crows harassed a pair of larger birds, ospreys we think, who seemed to have a nest high overhead.  We read until we needed book lights to continue, and we eventually opened the wine, spread out the cheese and crackers, and had a lovely picnic-style supper out on the lawn.

Yeah, not a bad spot for a picnic dinner.

As we were sitting there, we talked a little about our plans for tomorrow.  We’re driving down to Petaluma to meet an online friend for dinner, and from there we planned to come back north and east to I-5 and spend the night somewhere near Williams.  But we weren’t tied to a reservation, and after a little discussion we thought we would really rather spend one more night in our caboose.  Williams is less than 50 miles from here, so the drive wouldn’t be appreciably shorter tomorrow, and we are really enjoying our stay at Featherbed Railroad.

We couldn't bear to leave!

A quick trip to the office, where I found Peggy even though it was after hours  (She was watching Dr. Who, which made Steve remark “I knew she was one of our people.”) confirmed that the caboose was available for tomorrow, so we were all set.

We cleaned up our picnic, took the last of the wine inside, and I soaked while Steve sat in the cupola and caught up on his Facebook and email before taking his turn in the tub.

Time for me to turn into a pumpkin now, and get some sleep.  A final day of adventure, dinner with a fantastic writer, and a final night of sleeping in a caboose await us tomorrow.   I can hardly wait!

Panhandling Part 2: Christy and Steve Discuss Murder and Mayhem On the North Florida Coast

PART 2: Real Places and Imaginary Towns

STEVE: One thing our two mystery series (The Haunted Souvenir Shop, and Panorama Beach Mysteries) have in common, other than being set in the same region of north Florida, is that they're both set in fictional cities, mine in Panorama Beach itself, and the environs of fiction Pascua County, Florida, yours in the town of Keyhole Bay, just a bit further west on the coast.

There are a lot of reasons to write a fictional place, and I wonder if the reasons we did it were the same, or very different.

For my part, I'm writing about fairly recent history, and an area with a fairly small population.  I wasn't trying to write an expose or a literal history.  My initial intent was just to see all those crazy attractions, the fake volcanoes, the concrete dinosaurs, the space-age observation towers, the amusement park midways, and create a mythology of where they came from, and where they went.  But my myth kept trending back towards the truth.  Maybe a bigger, grander, more colorful version of the truth, but real things that happened in Florida and the south back in those days, some I experienced, some I only heard about later, but all, in spirit derived from some kind of truth.

There are even times when you can be more truthful in some way, because you don't have to worry about being sued by real people.  I'm careful to remind people that while sometimes the events I write about have truth to them, the people, relationships, and circumstances are completely fictional.

So, what's your reason for creating Keyhole Bay?

CHRISTY: My reasons and experience are both the same and different.  I do agree that it's nice not to worry about being sued, especially when you have dead bodies piling up!  But I had other reasons, as well.

In many of my previous books I have used real locations, especially in my two Alias novels where I had scenes in places as remote as the Blue Desert in the Sinai, a Russian apartment building, and Deadhorse, Alaska.  My gratitude for travelers who posted reports and photos on the net is extreme.  Doing that research, however, made me realize how complicated using a real setting can be.

The Haunted Gift Shop series, along with the previous Lady Plumber series, require an intimate connection with the location.  I have to know the location of each and every business, the streets and highways, the kinds of houses and neighborhoods, the population demographics - just tons of details.  Of course, every story requires at least some of that knowledge, but these stories are very localized, and the small towns where they are set are almost another character. 

In developing the fictional city of Keyhole Bay, I have control of all those elements, but I am still constrained by the limits of probability.  For instance, I can't have snow storms, but I can have hurricanes, and summer heat.

What restrictions have you discovered in creating your fictional setting?

STEVE:  Well, I think you've hit on something when you say the location is also a character.  I feel very much that way about Panorama Beach, and I think that for a smaller locale anyway, that works better when you fictionalize the place.  With a major city like New York or Chicago or Las Vegas it's fine, because nobody knows everything about them, or expects to.  There are a million untold stories there, and even a local can easily accept that the story you're telling about the city is just one of those.  But you could study a small place like Defuniak Springs or Panama City Beach and know, if not everything, then most of the major stuff about it, and I'm sure there are people with that level of knowledge.

It's also like writing a non-fiction novel about a real person.  You never really know what their most private experiences and inner thoughts are.  You can speculate.  You can go on what they're chosen to share of themselves.  But on some level you have to speculate, just start making things up, or simply have to string the facts of their life together without really being certain how or why those things happened.  But when you make up a fictional character based on a real person, for example the character Charles Foster Kane in the movie "Citizen Kane," who is clearly based on William Randolph Hearst, then the writer can know with great precision everything about them, every secret, every private thought, every hidden failing, and act on them without hesitation.  I never have to ask myself, "was the Chief of Police in Panama City Florida in 1967 a crook or a straight-shooter?  The Chief of Police in Panorama City is a corrupt bad guy, representative of other corrupt lawmen and politicians of the period, if not in that exact place and time.

But you mentioned restrictions in making my fictional setting.  I can't think of many.  In fact, it was very liberating in many ways.  Like you said, I want to know where everything in Panorama Beach is, to the extent that the reader should eventually feel like if they were there, they could get in a car and find their way around based on my descriptions.  I have a map, which continues to be refined as I advance the series, so I can keep it all straight.

If you look at a map of the Panama City/Panama City Beach area, you'll find a lot of similarities.  But for the sake of clarity, I simplified a lot of things, cleaned up coastlines, and the big change, Panama City Beach is on a spit of land that runs from the northwest diagonally to the southeast.  Just for clarity's sake, Panorama Beach in on a spit that runs east-west, with most of the major roads running the same direction, and cross streets are mostly north-south.  It saves confusion for both me and the reader.

How about Keyhole Bay.  Do you have any kind of map?  I know you've at least worked out some of the overall geography.  And it's interesting how the central body of water evolved from the inland, almost perfectly circular lake in Defuniak Springs to the keyhole shaped bay that the town is now named after.

CHRISTY:  I do have a map, although it isn't as well-developed (or attractive) as yours.  Mine is a just a pencil sketch, and you know I'm not an artist!  More important, for my stories, is to know where all the neighboring shops and things are.  A great deal of the map is devoted to laying out the main drag of Keyhole Bay, figuring out who Glory's neighbors are.  One of the other things I spent a lot of time on was the actual layout of Glory's apartment over the store.  A lot of scenes take place there, and I needed to know where everything is in her home.  The same goes for her friends' homes, and her shop.

Moving from DeFuniak Springs was an easy decision.  I still want to use DeFuniak someday as a setting for historical fiction (back to those ladies in hats!), but I also wanted a fictional town for my series, and wanted it to be reasonably close to a larger city.  I spent a lot of time looking at the map of the panhandle before I made my decision.

And while there are lots of limitations from the setting, it does allow me the freedom to create characters-some of them quite colorful-without inviting comparison to real people.


NEXT: Christy and Steve talk about the colorful characters, and where they come from.


Panorama Beach Mysteries: The Best Devil Money Can Buy
AMAZON - NOOK - SMASHWORDS (Also available through all major ebook outlets)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: A Breath Away From Dying
AMAZON - NOOK - SMASHWORDS (Also available through all major ebook outlets)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: Two Bad Days of Summer
(Print collection of both of the above, coming soon)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: The Beat of Angel's Wings
(Ebook coming soon)

A Problem in the Pipes - "Sink Trap," Chapter 1 (continued)

The first part of Chapter 1 was posted last week, here. (Go ahead, go read that post, we'll wait.)

Here's the rest of the chapter. I hope you'll enjoy it enough to want to pre-order the whole book, which you can do HERE. And, yes, there will be a Kindle version for you early adopters. Just follow the "other editions" link from the page that link takes you to on Amazon.

Chapter 1 (continued)

The inspection of the Tepper warehouse hadn’t gone well. So far, we’d discovered one restroom with some serious leaks, and a stopped-up utility sink.

Fortunately for me, clogged pipes are easier to diagnose than leaks, so Barry took the bathroom and I got the sink.

But on this job, nothing turned out to be simple. I’d struggled with a plumber’s snake for twenty minutes before I gave up, grabbed my tools, and crawled under the sink where my mother had found me.

Plumbers, in my limited experience, spent an inordinate amount of time under sinks. Or under houses. I’d take the sink any day.

From my cramped quarters back under the sink, I heard familiar footsteps echo through the empty warehouse. Over my shoulder I saw the worn steel-toe boots of my boss, Barry Hickey.

Lately, I identified everyone by their shoes.

“Hand me that work light, would you, Bear? I can hardly see what I’m doing under here.” The nickname fit his stocky frame and brown hair, though I didn’t use it often. It seemed a little too familiar.

But sometimes Barry felt more like the older brother I never had than my boss. And it didn’t hurt our budding friendship that I made the office computers do tricks he didn’t think possible.

Barry thrust the small round light under the counter, into my outstretched palm. “Getting late,” he said. “I’m done with that bathroom for now. We could knock off for the night, come back in the morning when you can see what you’re doing.”

I wiggled further under the sink and grabbed the wrench handle with my leather-gloved hands. I tightened the jaws around the connecting ring of the drain pipe, digging into seventy year’s accumulation of unidentifiable corrosion.

“I can see,” I protested. “Besides, another five minutes, I swear, and I’ll be done under here.” I grunted as I pushed against the wrench, my reward a scant inch of movement.

“And we can’t come back tomorrow,” I continued, as I braced myself for another push. “We have to do the walk-through on the Tepper house.”

The two properties were both owned by Martha Tepper, a retired librarian who’d left town a couple weeks back. I’d heard she was tired of Oregon winters and wanted someplace with sunshine.

I think she went to Arizona, though I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t seen much of her since I left for college, but I remembered her from summer vacations when I camped out in the mystery section of the library.

Now my mother and Gregory were working with Rick and Rachel Gladstone, Martha’s attorneys, on a deal for both properties.

“You promised Sandra it’d be done, and she wants to get back to the Gladstones before the end of the week.”

The wrench moved again. The pipes in the warehouse were old, but I had the right tools and a whole lot of stubborn.

“Sandra?” A disapproving tone crept into my boss’s voice. “Georgiana, she’s your mother.”

It bugged Barry when I called my mom by her first name, but it was one way I kept my personal and private lives separate. And as long as Hickey & Hickey worked for Whitlock Estates Realty, I needed that separation.

I’d already messed that up once today, talking to Sandra herself. I wasn’t going to do it again.

“She is. When I’m at her house for Sunday dinner or we’re visiting her sister in Sweet Home. Not when she’s paying for a job, Barry. Then she’s Sandra. Or would you rather I called her Mrs. Neverall?”

Barry’s feet moved away, out of my line of sight. He paced across the dirty concrete floor of the warehouse.

Barry wasn’t good at waiting.

I herked on the wrench one more time and the connector ring broke free. A couple good turns and I was able to put the wrench down and turn the coupling by hand.

The stubborn joint came free, releasing the end of the outlet pipe. A gush of stagnant water ran into the waiting plastic bucket. Judging by the stench, that water had been sitting in the pipe for a long time.

I dropped the rusty coupling in the bucket and wormed my way back out from under the sink.

“You know, Barry, you didn’t put ‘contortionist’ on the job description.” I reached back in for the work light and played the illumination over the end of the pipe to be sure the flow of stinky water stopped before I moved the bucket.

Barry chuckled. “You’re the girl who wanted to be a plumber,” he said.

“Woman, Barry. Woman. Your daughter is a girl. Maybe. But I am not a ‘girl.’ Haven’t been for years.” I reached under the sink to retrieve the bucket.

“Megan’s twelve. Of course she’s a girl.”

I glanced up, shaking my head. “Not so much anymore, Barry. She might tolerate you calling her that right now, but not for much longer.”

Through the high windows of the warehouse, the sky was nearly dark. I let go of the bucket and pulled back the cuff of my leather glove to glance at the scratched plastic bezel of my dime-store watch. I had learned the hard way never to wear a good watch when messing with pipes.

Nearly seven. How did it get so late? I was late for dinner with Wade.

I bit back a curse. Barry tolerated a lot from me, but one of his rules was no cursing in front of customers, which had morphed into no cursing on the job. Never mind that there wasn’t anyone in the building but the two of us, or that he was probably the only construction-trade guy in the country who didn’t swear a blue streak. It was still a rule.

The bucket stuck and I put my head back under the sink to see what the problem was, shining the light on the exposed pipe ends.

Something bright caught my eye. Given the condition of those pipes, there shouldn’t be anything bright under that sink.

Dirty, yes. Rusty, yes. Smelly, definitely.

But not bright and shiny.

I poked one gloved finger into the pipe, but the thick leather didn’t fit in the tight opening. I pulled the glove off, reached for the pipe, then reconsidered.

I had no idea what I was reaching for.

I grabbed a close-fitting latex glove from my pocket, stretched it over my hand, and reached back under the sink.

It was a lump of metal and stone, large enough to block most of the pipe. It should have been too large to have fallen down the drain, except the drain guard had rusted through, probably years ago.

The piece was lodged crosswise, and I pried it loose with my finger. It popped out of the pipe and landed in the bucket with a plop.

Curious, I fished it out.

It was a brooch. A very distinctive brooch, and one I thought I recognized. Martha Tepper, the retired librarian who was supposed to be in Arizona, had worn it every day, the same way a happily-married woman always wears her wedding band. If it was the brooch I remembered, she never went anywhere without it. So why was the librarian’s favorite accessory sitting in a glop of plumbing goo in my hand?

After being lodged in the drain pipe of an empty warehouse in Pine Ridge, Oregon?

And what was I going to do about it?

(To be continued...)



Order "Sink Trap" now:

We Have A Winner Times Two - and A Bonus Giveaway!

I want to offer my congratulations to the winner of the Advance Readers Copy of SINK TRAP

(Drum roll, please!!!)

Louisa of Portola, California!!!

This is the part where I thank you all for playing, and offer some consolation. Whatever. But since I really appreciate the support from all of you, well

(Would another drum roll be too much?)

We're giving away another book!

Same as before, except I'll keep all the current names (except you, Louisa. Sorry!) in the drawing and add any new ones. You've got about a week to be sure your name is on the list, but I want to be sure I get the book to you before it hits the stores, so you can get a head start on the rest of the world.

And while I'm giving stuff away, there's one more thing to give away tonight. At the suggestion of my dear husband, I've made some knitted Kozy Kovers for the Kindle e-reader. Over at http://www.yorkwriters.com/2009/08/free-kozy-kover-for-your-kindle.html I collected names to give away a Kozy, and the winner of the first Kozy is:

(Hey, drummer, you should know the drill by now.)


Robin Page!!!

Now, before you all go away and plot how to make me draw your name next week, I am going to offer a consolation prize. On Thursday - really, it's on my calendar for Thursday - I'm going to post the first chapter of SINK TRAP right here on the blog! (And there might even be a few more pages between now and the release date...)

Once again, thank you all for stopping by, for your kind words and your support. This Road to the Bookstore is always made better by the company of friends and fans!

Congratulations to our winners, and WATCH THIS SPACE.

Chris/Christy - Georgie - Daisy - Buddha - and all the residents of Pine Ridge

Kozy Giveaway

Take a look at for details on http://www.yorkwriters.com/ the Kindle Kozy Giveaway. A Kozy cover for your Kindle, to read cozy mysteries!!

And did I mention that it's FREE?