We took a trip to West Virginia last week. Its haunting beauty made me realize that however much I love the Southwest, these ancient hills have their own magic.

We hiked to Seneca Rocks from our wonderful B&B, North Fork Mountain Inn.



( more WV pics )

I've got a thing about beautiful bridges. Sometimes just looking at a picture of one (let alone seeing one in real life) makes my heart beat harder. When I need to look at something for inspiration while I'm writing, it'll often be a bridge, even if the story doesn't have a bridge in it. So Historic Bridges of the United States is one of my exciting web finds ever. Pic is "Lost Deck truss bridge over Malad River on Bear River Canal" in Box Elder County, Utah.

After Christmas we spent a couple of days with a friend who has a cottage in Ocracoke, an Outer Banks island (off the shore of NC). Among many other things I loved about the island--the trees were all whipped and stunted into goth contortions. This magic forest of live oaks was on a path from the cottage to Springer's point.



More pics and pirate lore ( behind the cut... )

I really want to go here. It's Fianello, a medieval town in Umbria, Italy. Town's motto is dove il passato e' ancora presente, "where the past is still present." Sounds like my kind of tourist trap.





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catrambo (or at least her husband) is dreaming of living on a boat.

For me it's a trailer like my grandparents' old trailer. Grandpa built in the furniture, including a cool dining booth with a table top that had a checker board stained into the wood. The bedroom was just that: the bed took up the entire room. Everything could be opened up for storage. The walls were paneled in smooth, honey colored wood. Grandma and Grandpa went everywhere in their trailer, but especially Mexico and Florida.

When they got too old to handle driving it, the trailer became their guest cottage. My sister and I lived there for a summer when we moved back to the mainland from Hawaii, while my parents went househunting in VA (their own vacation from us, too, I guess). It was fun, even if kinda scary giant bugs perched on the screens at night, eyes glowing (NC summer grows big bugs).

In reality, maybe Bruce and I would go nuts living in such a small place, but in my dreams it's our cozy retirement vehicle to freedom. To (almost) quote Cat, "But still. It looks pretty cool."

In case you're ever tried to picture what the apocalypse in your book should look like.

from bldg blog : "Airborne electricity grabs hold of a volcanic plume-–in this case, Chile's Chaiten volcano, which began erupting last week 'for the first time in some 9,000 years.'" Photo by Carlos Gutierrez for UPI. Check it out for story links and more pics.

General store interior in Alabama. Pic by Walker Evans, for the Farm Security Administration
gakked from wiki

pic from the roving medievalist

dawtheminstrel posted pics from around her house today. Snow the likes of which I never see where I live. I couldn't resist cropping one, lightening it a little, transforming it into a remote snowy mountainscape with a mysterious dome -- a cathedral? a palace? (Visit Daw to see what it "really" is.)

I would like to set a scene or even a whole story in this room.

pic from Axel Vervoordt