I suppose wonderful vacations do eventually have to end, simply so we can maintain perspective of why they're so wonderful.

Yep, today was the last day. We managed to get all of our possessions crammed back into our respective suitcases and checked out by about noon. Although we really didn't have any formal checkout, since the final bill was delivered to the room this morning showing the grand total that had been charged to the credit card. Speaking of credit cards, Disney has this extremely nifty deal where when you check into one of their resorts they print out a credit card with your name on it to serve as your room key, and if you give them an imprint of a real credit card, then you can use your room key to charge anything on Disney property to the room. That was a massively convenient feature for us since we split the bill, and it made dining out quite simple. No worries about whose turn it was to pay, or who had payed for how much when. Just wait for the final bill and divide by two. Most excellent.

So, we killed time for a couple of hours, looking at the pics Kent had taken and talking about writing some. I'm feeling very motivated to dive back into the serious writing again--something I've not been feeling much of lately.

We made it to the airport, where Kent found out that his connecting flight to San Jose had been cancelled. The weird thing was that the ticket agent, after telling Kent that he had no flight home, typed on his console for a minute or two then just shrugged and said, "No, sorry, I can't get a flight for you to San Jose tonight." And didn't even offer to try to find a flight on another airline or anything. So Kent finally managed to get the guy to see if he could get a flight to San Francisco, which he could it turned out, and also politely demanded ground transportation from the San Francisco airport to his home. So finally after all the ticketing woes were settled, we made our way to the gates. Of course our flights were leaving at opposite ends of the airport, and there wasn't much difference in our departure times, so we had the super-mushy-emotional goodbye right in front of the metal detectors.

Other weird-silly thing was that when I got home, there was a message on my voice mail, time-stamped at 3pm today, asking Kent Brewster to call American Airlines about his flight today. Okay, I can see how they got my number, since I made the travel arrangements. But you'd think that just maybe they'd look at where he was flying from and think about the fact that he probably wouldn't be able to respond to a message left at home? Sheesh.

So now I'm home. There was a fairly pleasant personal rejection from Asimov's waiting for me in my stack of mail. Ah well. Keep trying.

One of the super-cool-nifty things that Kent did for me was to print and bind a copy of my novel in actual book form. Reading it in this format as opposed to ms format gives it a very different feel, and gives me a much better idea of how the scenes flow and where it drags. It also showed me things like the one page I had where every paragraph on the page began with "she." Yeesh. I skimmed through that on the flight home. It's been a long time since I've really read through that book, and there's much that has become somewhat fuzzy in my head about the overall plot. Not good since I really need to leap in and start tackling the sequel. This manuscript has been at Baen for 16 months now, and yes, now that I'm back from my vacation I'm going to write a query letter and try to find out what the deal is.

Kent stuck the camera out at arm's length and took this picture right after the final splashdown on Splashwater Falls (or whatever the heck the ride is called where you go down all the waterflumes in logs.) I'm not sure if you can see how wet we got. I'd forgotten to stick a comb in my fanny-pack, so my hair was pretty truly fried for the rest of that day. Didn't matter though, Kent still looked at me with the same incredible expression. He has this delighted-little-boy smile that he gets on his face whenever he looks at me that makes me just melt. He makes me feel beautiful and sexy and smart, and he's oh-so-very good for me. I love him. I can't wait to see him again.